


In the Long Dusk

by Aesoleucian



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Anthology, Gen, ghost hunt tv show au!, it will never be 'completed' by your standards, no overarching plot to this one just a new spirit every week
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-29
Updated: 2019-10-30
Packaged: 2020-03-29 12:56:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 19
Words: 40,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19020370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aesoleucian/pseuds/Aesoleucian
Summary: It isn't quite horror and it isn't quite not horror. It is, mostly, strange.





	1. The Interviews

**Interview 1.**

“It says here you have a master’s in parapsychology. What’d you do your thesis on?”

“Oh, it was, um, on how ghosts and spirits relate to the grieving process?”

“That sounds interesting, and I’d love to read it some day, but parapsychology isn’t exactly our thing. People use it to explain why ghosts _aren’t_ real.”

“Er, right, and if there’s no rational explanation you’ll be that much closer to proving you’ve got a ghost, right?”

She smiles at him. “Fair point. What role were you thinking of taking? Research?”

“Um, I was actually sort of hoping to do interviews? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m good at research. But the human side is what interests me more.”

“Brill. I’m a grieving widow, I’ve seen my husband standing in the back garden, staring up at my window at night. But every time I rush down to see him, he’s gone.”

He blinks at her for a moment, and then seems to switch gears. “How do you know it’s your husband, Mrs. King?”

“Do you think I wouldn’t know my own husband? The way he stands, the way he looks at me, of course it’s him. He’s just waiting for me to let him in but I can’t, I just don’t know why.”

“I know he understands you’re trying your best. Can I ask—when does this happen? What time of night, how often do you see him?”

“Er, about once a week, and always in the middle of the night. Not on any particular day. But it’s always after I’ve been thinking about him. He can tell I miss him.” She covers her mouth and turns her face away, fighting a smile. It’s a pretty obvious trap, but some people still fall for things like this.

“Ghosts are often very sensitive to people’s emotions,” he says. “When we’re alive we tune into the people around us, but for spirits that’s what’s all around them. Their world _is_ our feelings for them. He’s here because you love him and miss him so much. He misses you too. Mrs. King, what help do you want from us? We can’t bring your husband back. But maybe we can help you make peace with his spirit.”

Melanie breaks character to begin clapping, grinning broadly. “Oh, well done, Mr. Blackwood. I can see why you consider yourself a people person.” He blinks, and hastily wipes at his eye. For the sake of his dignity she pretends not to notice. “Of course, if you can do research as well it’d be an immense help. We need all hands on deck.”

“Y-yeah. I can do that. Sorry, you’re a really good actress. I wasn’t expecting to, um, wow.”

“No problem. You’re an empathetic guy, I get it. Do you think you can do me a little writeup on the Tower of London by tomorrow? I’m not using it for the show, it’s just a standard comparison. I want you looking for things you think would be interesting. You’ve seen some of my solo videos, right?”

“Yeah. They’re brilliant! That’s part of why I’m here.”

“Flattery will get you everywhere. I’m kidding, this is a meritocracy. So if you’ve seen my videos you have some idea of what I’m looking for. But don’t do what you think I would do. I want researchers who can think independently, who bring their own thing to the show.”

“Yeah! Yes, I can do that. I have your email, so, um, I’ll just... go. Thank you!”

 

 

**Interview 2.**

This one’s _fit_. Maybe in kind of a douchey way, given his sense of style, but the sample video he sent in just makes him look like a good guy who loves his friends. “I liked your video,” she says. He grins at her. “It’s a little hard to tell how you’d work with actual good cameras, given that you’ve been using amateur equipment. Do you know how to use one of these?”

He takes the camera from her and studies it. “I reckon I could work it out pretty quick. It’s not that different. Plus, you’re not just hiring me for my camerawork. I’m a good editor too.”

She raises her eyebrows at his confidence, amused. “You’re all right. I mean, you’re no Alexia Crawley.”

“Yeah, but who is? Besides her, I mean. You ever kind of want to kidnap her so she can make movies that actually mean something? Oh, G-d, not that I kidnap people. Er, sorry, off topic. Did you look through my architecture photography?”

“Yeah, your framing sense is really good. I could wish for a few more abandoned buildings, since that’s mostly what we’ll be shooting in…”

“Oh, I’ve got those. My brother’s mad for that sort of thing right now, I just thought you might like the artsy ones more. I can get on Drive on my phone, hang on.”

She watches him scroll through photos on his phone for a moment, then says, “I _would_ kidnap Alexia Crawley, though. I don’t think I could hire anyone who legitimately liked Banks’ films for anything other than the cinematography.”

“I’ve met so many of those people,” he mumbles at his phone. “Wanted to bloody murder most of them. Not that I murder people. Oh, here we go. Scroll right from here.”

“These are fantastic, why’d you send me a bunch of churches?”

“I’m into neo-Gothic architecture,” he says, rather sheepishly. “Plus, you’d be surprised how many of those buildings are haunted.”

“Huh! Well, tell you what, Mr. Stoker, I’ve got a couple more interviews to do, but you’re at the top of my list right now. I’ll call you back by the end of the week to let you know.”

“Brilliant. And please, call me Tim.”

 

 

**Interview 3.**

“All right, I’m trying not to be offended, but is our site _really_ so bad you felt like you had to apply for a position I wasn’t even advertising for?”

“It’s… it’s okay. It’s a fine site. But people are always underestimating how important it is to have a good website. The thing is, I want your show to happen. It’s really, _really_ cool. I’m not sure I believe in ghosts, but I do believe in your show. I mean, I think it will be different. I can do a bit or research too, if you want, I’m pretty good at spin. But I could also use that skill for social media management.”

“First, thank you. Second, I would love to hire you as soon as I see what you’ve worked on, besides your website portfolio, and technically I’ve got to check with my producer as well, but I think he’ll be fine. Have you ever done social media management before? Forum moderation, anything like that?”

“I was actually a mod on a, er, haunted antiques forum for a while? The forum got closed down a couple years ago, but it wasn’t because of mismanagement, it was because it turned out some of the users had been desecrating graves to make actually really haunted antiques out of people’s bones. “

“Okay, I’m going to need that story before you go any further.”

 

 

**Interview 4.**

“It’s a bit of an unorthodox career choice.”

“Not really. I’ve spent a lot of time volunteering at libraries.” Melanie raises her eyebrows. “And listening to ghost podcasts. I mean, the thing I really find interesting is the sense of history. All these connections between events and if you trace them to the end you find… well, something.”

“Does your background as a detective have anything to do with that?”

She smiles. “Maybe.”

“So, were you thinking just research, or do you have any other skills that will be useful to the team? Because I’m sorry to say we’re kind of swamped in applications by pure researchers.” That’s an exaggeration. Melanie _wishes_ enough people were excited about her project to swamp her in any kind of application. But there is something of an imbalance.

“I know all the laws about breaking and entering.” She laughs. “And I know when it’s reasonable not to care. I’m also a bit of an expert in getting into places. I can pick locks, I know my way around a pair of bolt cutters, I know the rug trick, and I’m pretty damn good at climbing.”

“Sounds great,” says Melanie, with relish. “Honestly you’re the only person who has offered to climb a fence for me so I’m tempted to hire you right now, but to be fair I have to ask you to do a writeup on the Tower of London as if you were doing background for the show. What you think would be interesting to highlight, what angle you’d go for, that kind of thing.”

“I mean, I could do that right now, off the top of my head. Saves an email.”

Melanie might be in love.

 

 

**Interview 5.**

At first she thinks he’s a hipster. The glasses are right, and he’s wearing a fucking cardigan with _elbow patches_ , for heaven’s sake. She never wants to talk to a hipster ever again, in her life, but she _is_ a great actress, so she does a decent job of pretending she doesn’t immediately dislike him.

“So your only skill is research and you have a degree in literature. Why should I hire you when my other picks have skills like breaking into buildings and being nice to grieving widows?”

The hipster scowls and looks at her from under his brows. “Arguably the fact that I specialize makes me _more_ suited to research, not less. I have a great deal of experience sifting through texts for relevant information, and I’ve been told my synthesis is excellent. I never stop until a project has finished.”

“Right. Then why are you here instead of compiling historiography from accounts of the First World War or something?”

“Because there are things in this world that I do not understand. Things that any reasonable person would be terrified of.  I’ve… _made contact_ only once, but I find it impossible to forget. If you are the researcher I think you are, you will understand what I mean when I say there are some things I cannot live without knowing.”

“You’ve made contact? What exactly does that mean?”

He’s silent for a moment, seeming to look inward. At no point during this conversation has he stopped frowning. Does he get headaches? “When I was eight years old I spent a great deal of time wandering the city unsupervised. I found my way into all sorts of places where I should not have been, including a disused library. Many of the books had not been taken when the building was shut down, and I thought to rescue as many as I could carry. The basement of the library was damp and scrawled with graffiti, but stranger still, littered with small personal items. Not as if people were leaving offerings, but scattered across the floor. I later learned that it was popularly considered to be haunted, and that several people were supposed to have disappeared there. Both of those things were in fact true. Because in the basement of that library lived a bloated, many-legged thing that liked to claim trophies. I nearly became one of them.”

Melanie blinks at him. She has never met anyone who could say something like that with a straight face. She can only assume he’s overdramatizing. “Well, then,” she says. “If you ever feel like telling me that again, but in a way that actually conveys any information, please do. In the meantime, I’d like you to take a day and find me anything you think is interesting or notable on the Tower of London. It’s a standard assignment for the research applicants.”

“Is there a maximum page limit,” he says, looking down his nose at her as he stands up.

“There’s a patience limit. I’ll leave you to guess what it is.”

 

When she reads his writeup, she sends him an email offering him a job on the spot. It’s one thing to have the voice of a narrator, but it’s quite another to be able to script like one.


	2. The Twisted Tree

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> contains big spiders. spiders in mouth.

The team comes together for the first time in their ‘offices,’ which are actually a warehouse behind an IKEA. Melanie’s bought Thai food to grease the wheels of introducing seven people who have never met each other, so they’re all sitting around a table, waiting expectantly for her to finish introductions.

“Let’s keep this quick,” she says. “Don’t want the food getting cold. All of you know me, since I’m the lead on this show. And Elias has at least seen your applications.”

Elias smiles warmly around the table. “Pleased to meet you. It’s rather exciting to be in a room with so much talent. I’m Elias Bouchard, Melanie’s producer.”

“And I’m Michael, his clone assistant!” Michael laughs his strange, irritating laugh, and as everyone turns to stare at him, Melanie has to restrain herself from covering her face. “No? No-one listens to Stellar Firma? Well, it’s quite a good joke if you have. Er, yes, well, I am Elias’ assistant. I’m the ghost of the IKEA.”

Luckily, it’s Tim who’s next in line, and he knows how to go with a bit. “Yeah, I personally used to be a Blockbuster but I got closed down and decided to be a cameraman.  It pays the bills.” He flashes a smile, and gets a few laughs. He’s going to be good for team cohesion, Melanie can already tell. “I’m a bit of an amateur but I’ve done a lot of videos with my brother. I also do video and sound editing. Sorry, my name’s Tim Stoker.”

“I’m Sasha James. I’ll be handling the web side of things. I’d still love to come to shooting locations, though. If necessary I’ll take some pictures of people having a good time for publicity, but really I’d love to see some haunted buildings as well.”

“Martin Blackwood. Er, research and interviews. I guess I’ll be a presenter? So, I’m excited to work with you.”

“Basira Hussain, research, breaking, and entering.”

“Jonathan Sims,” says the man Melanie is beginning to realize is _not_ a hipster, and is in fact completely serious about the way he dresses. He eyes Basira suspiciously. “Researcher and, apparently, scriptwriter.”

“And you should hear his voiceovers,” Melanie adds, mostly to embarrass him. “So that’s all of us, and we can eat. While we do, I thought it’d be good to get everyone’s thoughts on interesting locations. Everyone here has a different background, so you’ll have heard of places I haven’t.”

“Bolton Strid,” says Tim immediately as he serves himself curry. “It’s not like it’s unknown, but I dunno if anyone’s ever gone in with the assumption that it’s actually haunted.”

In the seat next to him Michael is frantically hunting for paper and a pen; Elias leans over to murmur to him, “I’m recording. You can transcribe this later.”

“How do we feel about fairy mounds?” asks Sasha. “I know some really good fairy mounds. Or, if we want to do an episode on haunted antiques, I’ve got connections.”

“I can come up with a list of interesting abandoned buildings,” says Basira, glancing at Michael. “I bet I can find out some urban legends pretty easily.”

Melanie loves her job, and she thinks she loves her team already.

 

As much as the team is really, truly trying to identify real supernatural occurrences, the first three episodes don’t come up with any solid proof. There’s circumstantial evidence: in the old military hospital everyone agrees that there is one room that smells of blood and literally made Martin sick. And there were far more strange noises than one would expect from a totally empty hospital, but that was all.

Still, they’re solid television, and they’re getting good ratings. Melanie has rarely been prouder of anything than when they all gathered in the warehouse to catch the live premier on the ancient CRT television that Elias seems to keep around mostly for ambiance. Sasha and Martin murmur approvingly at Jon’s ominous voiceover, and Tim cannot stop delightedly pointing out tricky shots that he didn’t think he’d pull off. Melanie’s personal favorite part, although she’d never admit it, is the credits segment. As names scroll up the side of the screen, the whole team is gathered around the large table in the warehouse, joking about the research they’re doing for the episode. And yes, Melanie is passionate about research ethics, and yes, she thinks ghosts are important—but this is the heart of the show. The viewers seem to agree that the team’s chemistry is what makes them appealing.

“You’ve got a bit of a fanbase,” she hears Sasha telling Tim later that week.

“What? I’m not _that_ good. Yet.”

“I’m sorry to say that your camera skills have very little to do with it.”

He rolls his eyes. “You work your ass off to make a good show and people are only interested in your looks. Typical. Did any of them leave contact info?”

“As your social media manager, it is _not_ my job to get you dates. Go to a swing dancing class like the rest of us.”

The fourth shoot, though, is different. Of all places they’re going to an orchard. Melanie’s never heard of a haunted orchard before. They’re really not naturally ominous places, especially not this one on one of the few sunny days so far in September. She tells Tim and Sasha to get some shots of the sun-drenched apple trees (for a _what evil lurks beneath?!_ voiceover later) and starts helping set up the picnic Martin brought along. And if Basira shins up a tree to throw down apples, who’s going to tell?

Well. Melanie is putting it in the credits, so technically Tim is going to tell.

After lunch they get to business. Melanie and Martin interview the owners, a lovely older couple who are not best pleased with all the customers who’ve come away terrified of ‘the twisted tree,’ unable to say exactly what happened to them. The tree _is_ rather unsettling, even with all its leaves on and a large crop of improbably shiny apples. The structure of its branches is quite unlike the other apple trees, with eight thick black-barked limbs that arch high into the air and then back down. They bow so low that nearly all of the apples are in easy picking range. “I feel a little weird about all this low-hanging fruit,” Melanie jokes for the camera.

“It’s strange, isn’t it,” says Martin, and glances over at Mr. Chilton, who’s hanging back a few meters away from the tree’s furthest branches. “Doesn’t it look a bit like an enormous spider crouched over us? And these are like wax fruit. I’ve never seen such a perfect apple.”

“I’m going to eat one,” Sasha announces, and reaches up.

Melanie smacks her hand away. “The Chiltons told us not to, come on. Scrumping’s one thing, but they’re literally right there.”

“They look really good.” Sasha seems almost in a trance as she reaches up again. Melanie grabs both her hands, but she tries to squirm out of Melanie’s grasp. “Let go! I just want to try one!”

Before Melanie can think who to yell to for help, Sasha punches her in the face, knocking her back, and grabs an apple.

“What the hell, Sash, don’t eat that!” says Tim’s voice as Melanie lies on the ground, winded. “Jon, help me—Melanie’ll kill me if I drop this!”

“I’ve never fought anyone before! Dammit!”

By the time Melanie gets back up, Tim has pushed the camera into Jon’s arms and is holding Sasha’s wrist away from her, squeezing it to make her drop the apple. “Spit it out!” he’s yelling.

Sasha’s face has gone grey, and there’s something white peeking out of her mouth. Tim pries her jaw open and pulls out something that is clearly _not_ a piece of apple. A moment later he yells and drops it, and Sasha bends over, spitting something out onto the ground. Hundreds of small, translucent white spiders are scuttling away from the white thing lying in the grass by her feet. Tim whacks her on the back, hard—she makes a gagging noise and coughs up a few more spiders.

“You didn’t swallow any, did you? Fuck.”

“I think I’m fine,” says Sasha hoarsely. “Just to make sure, I want to drink a large glass of whisky to kill anything that’s down there.”

“What is that?”

Melanie turns to find Jon staring up in fear at the crotch of the tree, pointing the camera at something that darts out of sight as soon as she looks. “Jon?”

“It was the size of a—of a small cat. With too many legs. I’d like to leave.”

When Melanie turns back to look at Sasha, Tim and the Chiltons are escorting her away. Her shoot is going to shit and she has no-one to blame but the tree. “Stop rolling,” she snaps at Jon.

Half an hour later, after Sasha has drunk a generous measure of scotch and thrown up a couple spiders in the Chiltons’ sink, Basira gives her professional advice: “I don’t know why you haven’t burned that thing before, but you really should. Nothing good is ever going to come out of that tree.”

Mrs. Chilton swallows and nods; her husband glances again at Sasha, who is lying on the table with her head in her arms and Martin rubbing slow circles on her back. “You’re right,” says Mrs. Chilton. “But we don’t want the fire spreading to the other trees, and it’s been hard all on our own. We’ll have to dig a firebreak.”

Shovels are found, and everyone cuts up great blocks of turf some distance from the twisted tree’s outermost branches. Sasha, who has been exempted for reasons of drunkenness, guards the cameras on their tripods as they record everyone else sweating in the late afternoon sun. She seems to be enjoying heckling them, at least, so she can’t be too traumatized. At last the work is finished, buckets are brought out to dampen the ground in the firebreak, and Mr. Chilton fetches a jug of kerosene. He carries it with great solemnity, like a man bringing the final components for a ritual. And in a way, maybe it is a ritual.

He lets Sasha light it.

They all stand outside the firebreak, watching the flames lick up the trunk and catch on the low-hanging branches. Tim is certainly getting some beautiful shots of it—and then _things_ begin to  scuttle out from somewhere, perhaps from underneath the roots. They are, as Jon described them, the size of small cats. Gray-brown, furry, and many-legged.

Jon kills the first one by cutting it clean in half with the edge of a shovel, and quickly everyone else takes up stations around the firebreak to do the same to the other escapees. It’s brutal, disgusting work, and getting hotter and hotter as more of the tree begins to blaze against the evening sky. But before too long no more of the things are coming out, and they’re free to rest. Tim gets a closeup of one of the bisected corpses before they all go back inside. Mrs. Chilton hasn’t had time to make dinner, so Jon and Basira pitch in. It’s late, late, by the time dinner is over, but everyone seems to feel that they’ve done a good thing today.

“Are you all right with us publishing this video?” Melanie asks the Chiltons. “I’ll understand if you don’t want this released to the public.”

Mr. Chilton laughs. “I think it’ll be good publicity, don’t you, Emma? The tree’s dead now, so it won’t be hurting anyone else, and maybe a few more people will come to see where it stood.”

“And buy some apples while they’re here,” says Mrs. Chilton, with some satisfaction.


	3. The Spirit of the Shard

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fear of falling. fear of the infinite.

_Episode 4: The Twisted Tree_ gets an incredibly mixed reception online. A third of the viewers seem to think it was staged and want to yell at Melanie about it; a further third think it was staged and love the new direction the show is going in; and the rest believe fervently in the truth of the matter and keep sending worried messages asking if Sasha’s okay. Everyone seems to be able to agree that the shot composition was excellent, spurred on by Tim’s brief post-credits segment where he urged everyone to “Comment if you thought the cinematography was cool!”

Melanie can’t say she’s surprised, but she is a little angry. People complained that she wasn’t finding compelling evidence of the supernatural, and now they complain when she does. There’s no winning on the internet.

The next two episodes are comparatively peaceful. If there are any spirits in St. Mary’s Church or the abandoned meat processing plant in Dalston, they don’t make themselves known. Melanie’s content to make a show about the grim history of strange places in London, if it comes down to that. She isn’t sure any more how much she wants to meet another spirit. Nobody is going to believe it’s conclusive proof anyway, so it feels a bit like she’s putting herself and her crew in needless danger.

“You don’t want to know _why_?” Jon asks, when she confesses this to him and Sasha. “You don’t want to know how they came to be here?”

“Of course I do, but—look, Sash, you almost got, I don’t know, maybe eaten by spiders from the inside out. We had to kill a bunch of them with shovels. How am I going to ask you to do that again?”

“I can quit any time,” says Sasha gently. “You’re not making me do anything. I don’t even have to be on location! But I want to be part of it. I feel the same way as Jon. I want to know more about all this, I want to know if there are more spirits, if that even _was_ a spirit or just a bizarre tree full of giant spiders.”

“Just so long as you’re sure,” Melanie mutters.

Episode seven is going to be about the Shard, after Basira dug up an article saying that several people among the construction crew were killed by lightning after being asked to work during a thunderstorm in 2011. Others, it’s rumored, slipped and fell, their steel safety cables cut neatly as if by scissors.

Technically no special permission is needed to film in The View From The Shard, but Melanie refuses to cut ethical corners. And anyway, she wants to see if she can get a discount on the absolutely ridiculous ticket prices. The answer she gets from the owner is that no, they may not have discounts, but yes, they may have the 9:30 PM timeslot to film when the observation deck is empty of other guests. So today it’s just Melanie, Martin, and Tim, having entered for a disgusting £126.

“This had better be worth it, Melanie mutters to Tim.

“Hush,” he says peaceably. “You’re ruining the ambiance. It’s not like we’re going to get a refund if we don’t see any ghosts, so why not enjoy ourselves while we’re here?”

“It is beautiful,” says Martin from where he’s leaning on the railing. His voice falls flat and quiet in the open air above London. The observation deck is lit in a surreal, blinding white that refracts through the glass to make it seem almost to glow, and Melanie feels like she’s snuck up here even after getting permission. She joins him at the glass pane and looks down into the city, a constellation of sodium orange and mercury white stars, with the black Thames winding through it.

Then she checks her watch. They only have twenty-one minutes left, and she needs to make them count. “We should ask the spirit to appear, if it’s here,” she says. Tim is on the far side of the observation deck taking in the view with the camera, so she jogs over to get him ready. “We’re going to start.”

He sets the camera up on its tripod, fiddles with a few things, and then gives her the thumbs up. They go to stand in the middle of the floor, and as if they were each separately cued at the same time, they all look up. It’s a clear night. Melanie has never before appreciated just how far away the stars are. She feels like she could fall into them.

Then she feels like she _is_ falling into them.

She grabs Martin’s shoulder for balance but finds him swaying too. Waves of dizziness wash over her, and she falls to the cement floor with a grunt of pain. She finds herself lying on her back, looking up at the stars with no further to fall, and yet… all the universe to fall down into. “I…” she says faintly.

“I think I’m going to be sick again,” says Martin.

“Does anyone else feel like gravity’s about to stop working?” Tim whispers. “You know, I always thought Danny was going to die doing something stupid before I had the chance.”

“We’re not going to die here. I forbid you to die. Come on, we’re getting up. We are _getting. Up_. She pushes up to a sitting position and nearly blacks out, but once the blood returns to her head she’s able to get ungracefully to her feet. It’s complicated by the feeling that if too much of her leaves the floor she’ll lose her anchor and fall into the sky.

There’s a figure, she realizes, sitting on one of the points of the open pyramid above her. Only its legs are really visible against the glowing white glass, its head and shoulders lost in the blackness of the sky.

“That’s dangerous,” is all she can think to say, although they couldn’t possibly hear her from what must be twenty meters up. “You’ll fall.”

They stand up, precariously, on the glass edge. And then they tip forward to fall, headfirst. She tries to run to where they’re going to land, but dizziness overtakes her and she staggers. She looks up just in time to see a shape disappear into the floor with a small ripple, as if it were water. The dizziness recedes and she stands staring at the unblemished cement. After a moment Tim and Martin join her. “Did you see that?” she asks. “Someone just dove off the spike thing up there.”

“I saw it,” says Martin. “I don’t know if I believe it, though.”

“You three are just too precious,” says a voice behind them. They all three whirl to see who it is: a small man who would be quite plain-looking if it weren’t for the branching white scar that climbs the side of his face and neck, and the way his long scarf floats around him as if he’s underwater. “You’re not tourists, are you?”

“We heard this place was haunted,” says Tim. “Are you one of the construction workers who died here?”

The man laughs. “What? I don’t know. Why would I be a construction worker?”

“They were killed by lightning,” says Melanie, touching the side of her own cheek.

“Oh. Huh. I wouldn’t know. All I really get from the people here is fear-wonder. What would it be like to fall from this high up? I could so easily climb over the glass and jump. The world is so, so big and I am at the very top of it. Don’t you want to know what it’s like to fall from the tallest building in Europe?”

While Melanie is wondering whether to tell him the Shard is no longer the tallest building in Europe, Martin says, “I’m fine not knowing, actually!”

“You sure?” says the man. “You can’t stop me. Just one death, at this time of night, isn’t going to stop anyone coming up here. They probably won’t even tell anyone. It’s so bad for business.”

Suddenly Martin gasps and—she can’t think of any other way to say it: he’s falling, although he’s still, just barely, on his feet. His clothes and hair whip around him in a wind that isn’t there, and he rises just a hair off the ground, beginning to turn slowly in place. Tim lunges forward to grab him but seems to trip off some invisible edge, begins to tumble. Now the two of them are falling together, too breathless to scream but with a loud terror in their faces.

“Stop it,” snaps Melanie. “Let them go.”

“Are you going to _make_ me?” asks the man, seemingly delighted.

“We both know I can’t make you do anything, but I’m asking you. Please don’t hurt them. I-instead you can… tell me about what it’s like to be you. No-one’s ever listened to you before, right? So that’ll be—be something new.” She thinks she’s doing a pretty damn good job keeping the shaky desperation out of her voice, and he looks thoughtful.

“That is new,” he agrees. “Why do you want to know?”

“I have a television show called Ghost Hunt UK. It’s less ghosts than general supernatural phenomena, but ‘Supernatural Phenomena Hunt UK’ doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.” She glances at Tim and Martin, and risks asking, “Will you let them go now?”

“I don’t know what some of those words mean but it sounds nice,” he says amiably. “And no, not yet. I’m enjoying their fear too much. It’s so much sharper than the quiet, hidden fear most people feel. _Terror_. I enjoy terror. It has an interesting flavor to it.”

“So you’re the… the spirit of the Shard, then?” she asks, looking again at Tim and Martin. She feels a little like if she takes her eyes off them for too long something awful will happen to them. But it makes her throat close up, and if she looks too long she might not be able to speak.

“I suppose so. I think of myself as fear given form. The fear of the wide sky.” He opens his arms as if to embrace the sky. It’s not like it comes down to meet him, but in the circle of his arms it seems to be—more _sky_ than elsewhere. “The sky is the most terrifying thing I can imagine,” he says breathlessly. “Imagine falling forever. Imagine knowing there was no ground to hit, nothing to end you. It’s not the ground that people are afraid of, it’s the fall. They are afraid of endlessness.”

“Yes,” Melanie whispers. “I can imagine that very easily.”

He grins. “Don’t imagine it too hard, or I might not be able to stop you joining your friends over there.”

She swallows and nods. Swallows again, and manages, “So when did you, er, come to exist?”

He tips his head up and seems to search the sky. “The stars weren’t so very different than they are now. It can’t have been that long.”

“The stars have been pretty much like that for thousands of years.”

“Oh, well then.”

He’s not very good at being interviewed—well, why would he be? Gather your scattered brains, Melanie, and ask open-ended questions, for G-d’s sake. “What sort of things do you do in a day?”

“What does fear do? It… _is_ frightening. I am frightening of the sky, and of the space between sky and earth. I am frightening of l’apelle du vide, as they call it. Or perhaps I _am_ it.” He walks closer, seeming to study her; she stumbles back only one step before she catches herself and stands her ground. “Are you afraid of falling?”

“No,” she says firmly. It’s not a lie, but it’s not completely true, either. At best, it’s something that can become true if she says it firmly enough. “If you fall, you fall. If you hit the ground, you die, and if you don’t, then I suppose you get used to it. Human beings can get used to anything. It’s one of our worst qualities.”

“I don’t like you very much,” says the man sadly. “Go away.”

He falls through the floor as if suddenly it has stopped being solid. She stares uncomprehendingly at the place where he was for half a minute, until she hears the sound of two bodies collapsing behind her. It breaks her out of the trance and she rushes forward to kneel down by Tim and Martin. “Hey,” she says. “Hey, are you all right?”

Tim gasps in a breath and rolls over slightly; a moment afterward Martin begins to breathe again too. “Did I hit the ground?” Tim murmurs. “Did I die?”

“He let you go.”

Tim sighs out the tension of trying to sit up, and tips his head back, eyes closed. “I’m quitting,” he says softly. “That’s not fair to you. We should all quit.”

Martin sits up and scrubs a hand over his eyes. He’s hunched over his knees and looks very small for such a big man. “You’re not going to, are you, Melanie?”

“No. I can’t quit now. Not until I find out why this is happening.”

“Fuck,” says Tim, sounding angry and tired. “I don’t—I hate letting people down. I don’t want to. Melanie, please. You can stop this show from happening. Don’t let everyone choose to get themselves killed.”

“We can find another cameraman, Tim. If you leave, it’s your choice. I’m not making it for you.”

“FUCK,” says Tim.

“We’re going to have to bleep that,” says Martin, and starts to laugh nervously. “Are we seriously going to air this? We could get someone _else_ killed.”

“No. We’ll film somewhere else. We’ll make sure it’s safe. Come on, we should leave. I’m sure our time’s almost up. We can talk about this in the car.”

She helps them to their feet. They collect the camera and leave, and Melanie barely has the presence of mind to thank the custodial staff for waiting for them. She drops Tim and Martin off at their places, and then goes home and fails to sleep at all that night.


	4. Five Thousand Pieces

“I spent the night making a rough cut of what happened at the Shard. I want everyone to watch it, and then you can make your decision.”

“This is all very ominous,” says Sasha. “What decision?”

“Whether you want to stay,” says Tim. He’s not his usual buoyant self. He’s not doodling embellished archways on graph paper or surreptitiously texting anyone today, just sitting with his arms folded, shaking the table with the force of his nervously vibrating leg. It’s as if he feels this is too serious an occasion to let his energy out, but he can’t contain it either. “We could’ve died, Sash. You could too, if you went.”

Melanie starts playing the video to forestall any further argument. Everyone falls silent to watch and listen, except Tim, who mumbles very quietly, “You haven’t synced up the audio right.”

“I only had a couple of hours,” she hisses back at him. “And I was sleep-deprived.” He shrugs and keeps drumming, drumming, drumming his heel against the floor.

The rest of the viewing is silent except for occasional gasps. When it ends, Melanie shuts her laptop with a snap and says, “We’re not airing this. We don’t want anyone getting it into their head to go up there looking for the spirit of the Shard. And the shots weren’t much good anyway. Staying centered onscreen wasn’t exactly our first priority. But the question I have for you is: knowing that we might find something like this again, will you stay? I am. Tim’s not.”

“I didn’t say that. I asked you to stop this project so certain people wouldn’t think it’s safe to stay and get themselves dropped off a building or something. They weren’t there. They don’t understand.”

“What was it like?” Basira asks.

“Awful.”

“Falling forever,” says Martin. “The air is going by so fast you can’t really breathe, and you can't hear anything over the wind. At first you’re afraid of hitting the ground… but then you realize you’re not going to, and that’s _worse_.”

“He could have just left us there forever!” says Tim. “Melanie couldn’t have stopped him. It’s just luck he got bored and let us leave. We have nothing to fight against them. There’s no—no exorcism or whatever that we can do to make it safe.”

“Yeah, of course not,” says Basira. “So here’s what we do: someone goes in first to scout out whether it’s safe. If it’s not, we only lose one person. If it is, everyone else can come.”

“Do you have to be such a fucking G.I. Jane,” mutters Tim.

“It’s just good sense exploring an unknown territory.”

“I’m willing to be the vanguard,” says Jon, and it’s so unexpected that everyone shuts up and turns to stare at him. “This work is important. It’s worth risking our lives for.”

“Are you _crazy_ —”

“Fine, it’s worth risking _my_ life for. I won’t comment on the value of _your_ life, Tim.”

“I’m not ditching Melanie, so could you for one second stop acting like you have some kind of moral high ground just because you’re too stupid to—”

“—re _not_ acting like you have the moral high ground? I’m speaking only for myself—”

“—ys just stop yelling about this and we can all—”

“SHUT! UP!” Melanie screams. When they don’t, she screams it again louder. And then they do. “We are going to vote, without talking! Raise your hand if you’re going to stay.” Jon, Martin, Basira—and pointlessly Elias, who doesn’t come on shoots anyway—raise their hands. “If you’re going to leave?” No-one moves. She rolls her eyes. “If you’re undecided or have some kind of, I don’t know, condition that needs to be met?” Sasha and Tim raise their hands.

“I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be voting?” says Michael in the silence.

“If you did, how would you vote?”

“Oh, I don’t really have a choice, do I? I live here.”

“RIGHT. Sash, you haven’t said anything yet. And everyone else, I would like to remind you, NO INTERRUPTIONS.”

“I do think it’s important work,” says Sasha hesitantly. “I’m just not sure if there _is_ a way to do it safely? I know the idea of only going to places that aren’t really haunted is the opposite of the point of the show, but…” She shrugs helplessly. “I don’t want anyone to get hurt.”

“Tim?”

“I’m planning on holding up production until we have a real plan.”

“We can hire another cameraman,” Elias tells Melanie. “You don’t have to let him hold the show hostage.”

“Shut up, Elias. I’m holding the show hostage too, now.” Tim makes brief eye contact with her, and nearly manages a grim smile. “Tim’s right. We’ve not been treating this seriously enough. We need safety procedures. Nobody was expecting, going in, that spirits would be this dangerous, but now we know.”

“Why _was_ no-one expecting it?” says Martin. “I mean, it’s not like nobody ever went looking for ghosts before. But either we’re the only ones who’ve ever found them, or everyone else who has done is covering it up for the same reason we are. I think we should find out if anyone else has had, um, experiences like us.”

“All in favor?”

All hands go up except Jon’s, until Sasha elbows him and he grudgingly raises it. Well, and Elias, but he won’t be doing any of the work anyway so he doesn’t count.

“Great,” says Melanie. “Now we just need to convince them we’re for real.”

 

It takes a _lot_ of convincing, but Sam Grossman does eventually share his story. He’s been something of a mentor to Melanie ever since she started her solo show on YouTube, so he knows her, knows when to take her seriously. But he still spends half an hour lying through his teeth that he’s never met a thing like the spirit of the Shard.

He finally cracks when Melanie spits, “Maybe you’re not the hunter everyone thinks you are. Maybe you’re like all the rest who never stray from the beaten track because you’re too scared to face anything real!”

“Don’t talk to me about facing something real!” he yells. “You want to know how I lost these fingers? It wasn’t in a bloody trailer accident.” He grimaces for a moment at her wide-eyed silence, and then sits slowly down again and hides for a moment behind his beer. “You’re the exact sort of fool who’ll hear about deadly danger and sprint straight for it ‘cause you’ve got something to prove.”

“Nice thought, but outdated. Nobody believes a fucking thing I tell them, even when I do have proof.”

“The twisted tree? Yeah. Should have released that before CGI got good. Now even solid footage isn’t proof. But I’m thinking you have something to prove to yourself as well.”

Melanie scowls and crosses her arms tightly over her chest. “How _did_ you lose your fingers?”

“Hmm. In a curio shop, of all places. This was in 2003, some time in late winter when it was absolutely bloody miserable out. You see, this was a place that almost never got any customers, but someone I knew’d been in and felt that it was creepy. Won’t name any names but she was a psychic, for whatever value of psychic you believe in, so she was prone to trusting her gut. It was only much later when I dug into the records that I found it had been closed ever since the owner died in 1999.”

“So the owner was a ghost.”

“No, Mel, she wasn’t a ghost. I’m getting to it, would you be patient for once?” He laughs at Melanie’s contrite frown. “Like I was saying, I interviewed her. Asked if there were ever any strange occurrences in her shop, did she hear odd noises, were any of her items weird? She told me all of her items were weird. That they sang to her at night. She said that every single thing in that place could kill. I… found it a little hard to take her seriously. Here was this little old woman telling me all this with a mischeivous twinkle in her eye. I thought she was having me on, if I’m honest. And she could tell I didn’t believe her. She beckoned me over to the counter and hefted up a jigsaw puzzle onto it. It was one of those five-thousand-piece ones, but no picture on the box. From what I could see of the pieces it looked like one of those Renaissance portraits with the dark red drapes behind them and probably a skull sitting on a table in the back.

“I asked her why she was showing me this, and she said I’d see if I started putting it together. I wanted to humor her, but, Mel, a five-thousand-piece puzzle. I could have spent half an hour just looking for the corner pieces. Angela, though, she found two from the middle that fit together, right away, and pushed them toward me. I put them together. Like a fool. I think that’s when she got me.

“There was a searing pain in my right forefinger.” He holds up his hand and points two inches above the knuckle he still has. “The first joint was gone. I gaped at it like a fish for far too long, ‘cause by the time I could react again she’d added another piece, and the second joint—plipt. Gone. I started yelling at her then, that whatever she was doing she’d got to stop, it wasn’t funny, _give it back_. She just put another piece in place and there went the third joint. I was scared as hell, you know back in 2003 I was an idiot thirty-one years old; all I could think to do was sweep all the puzzle pieces off onto the floor. But Angela didn’t give a shit, did she? She kneeled down and kept putting it together. Two more joints off the middle finger. I jumped right the hell over the counter and tackled her, and you know what, Mel? She just laughed. My hand burned again and I twisted around to see there was another Angela behind me, looking for the next piece.”

He sighs heavily. “I did the only thing I could think of. I’d not yet quit smoking then, so I had a lighter on me. I don’t really think it should’ve caught as easy as it did, but there you are. Finally Angela stopped smiling. She had this furious light in her eyes, and went to work as quick as she could. She only managed one more piece before the puzzle was too burnt up to put together any more. Then the carpet caught, and the desk, and she started screaming. No words, just this raw, animal scream that by the end barely sounded like it was coming from a throat. I ran out of there like my arse was on fire, which it very nearly was, make no mistake. I was about to leave the street entirely, except I noticed there was no-one else there. No-one to save the buildings on either side. So I called 999, and _then_ I ran for the nearest tube station.

“What the hell was I supposed to tell Al? I had no wounds, just these scars that looked years old. I said already, I was an idiot back then. So I went down to the butcher’s and begged some pig’s blood off them and told Al I’d already been to the hospital, see my gauze? I ended up cracking eventually. He has his ways. In the end he had to accept my explanation because he couldn’t think of anything more plausible. I felt it, when I saw you burning that tree. You’re not thirty-one yet, are you? Cursed age.”

“No. Still thirty.”

“Still a cursed age,” he mutters. “That’s the story. I looked up the shop and realized the real Angela Hyssop had been dead for years. And I don’t know what that thing was, but it wasn’t her ghost. She’d never sold anything bad to anyone. Interesting, though, that it was right next to the building where they caught all those kids sacrificing cats, isn’t it?”

“And you didn’t _wonder_?”

“Course I wondered. But I was too scared to do anything about it. That was half Angela and half Al putting the fear of G-d in me.”

“I bet you _do_ call him that sometimes.”

Sam laughs. “That’s between me and him. But you’ve got your answer, right? And you’re not going to go doing anything stupid?”

“Right. Soon as I see a jigsaw puzzle, I burn it.”

“No, idiot. Soon as you hear a rumor nobody else will touch with a nine-foot pole, you turn around and keep on walking.”

“I’ll _be_ careful, Sam. But I’m not going to give up on finding out what’s going on. You know this about me, so I trust you not to lie to me again. What I can do to make it safer?”

Sam shakes his head and takes another drink of beer, but he says, “The most dangerous ones like our fear. They live in places that make us naturally uneasy, see, like your lightning man. You were like a bad taste to him. If you’re not afraid they’ll pass you by. But actually managing that is quite another thing, even for someone as stubborn as you.”


	5. Forgotten Things

Melanie honestly thought a ghost train would be a safe bet. Lots of lovely shots of train stations and scenery going by, plenty of history for Jon to narrate in his most soothing voice, a funny bit where the ticket seller didn’t know a train even ran on this track. They’ve still brought lots of rope and pen knives and battery powered radios, though.

Most of the crew is here for this one. Basira apparently loves trains about as much as she loves historic landmarks, Tim and Sasha are mad about shooting here, and Jon wants to soak in the ambiance or something (she didn’t ask). Martin is staying home, “Just to recover a bit. I’m not leaving or anything! I just… I’m not ready yet.”

So it’s the five of them looking around at the nice little suburb they’ve found themselves in while they wait for the 1 PM train. It’s cloudy and cool today, but it doesn’t look like rain. A pensive sort of weather, perfect for a ghost train.

At 12:58 the train pulls into the station, and the closest set of doors opens automatically. Melanie, Tim, and Basira make their way toward the driver’s carriage and knock politely. When there’s no answer Basira pushes open the door and says, “Excuse me, we were hoping we could talk to you? It’s a sort of int…er… huh.”

There is no-one in the driver’s seat.

“Maybe it’s the other end of the train?” says Tim. “They sometimes have a place for a driver at both ends.”

“Nobody drives from the back,” says Melanie, because at that moment the train has started moving forward. “I suppose we can check anyway.”

“Just let me get a nice dramatic shot of the invisible driver. But if this turns out to be a literal ghost train I am going to be so pissed off.”

When Tim’s got his shot they head back into the first carriage, where Sasha is chatting to another passenger. Melanie is surprised to see one at all. “Oh, hey, guys,” says Sasha brightly. “This is Beatrice. She takes this train every day.”

“Would you mind an on-camera interview?” Melanie asks. “It’s for a TV show we make.”

“All right,” says Beatrice. She has long shiny black hair, wide eyes, and looks almost too young to be taking the train on her own. “Can I keep talking to Sasha?”

Melanie gives the thumbs up, and Tim gets in position.

“So, Beatrice, how long have you been taking this train? Do you remember before the schedule changed?”

Beatrice shakes her head. “No, I haven’t been riding it for that long. I can’t imagine what it would be like with lots of people riding it.”

“Where are you going?”

“To the end of the line.”

“Do you just like to ride the empty train?” Basira asks, smiling at her.

“Something like that. It’s kind of sad, but it’s peaceful too. And everyone who comes here has such interesting reasons. You’re all looking for something. Trying to find things out.”

“Do you ride the train every day?” Beatrice nods. “How often do you see other passengers?”

“I don’t know. Definitely not every week.”

Melanie lets the interview wash over her and sits with her arm over the back of the seats, looking out the window at the trees rushing past. It’s kind of restful to not be the one doing the interviews, for once. She might even wander off.

“Oi, Jon,” she whispers. “You want to come see if we can find the driver? My handheld should be good enough for this.”

“Wasn’t he in the front?” Jon asks, getting up to follow her.

“No. You reckon it’s an automated train?”

“I don’t think they have those here.” He closes the door carefully behind them and goes to open the one to the next carriage. He pauses one step in, with the door only halfway open, and Melanie looks over his shoulder to see why.

Beatrice is sitting in the very same seat in the middle of the carriage, staring out the window. Melanie darts back to the window to the other carriage and points her camera at it to catch Sasha and Basira still interviewing Beatrice.

“Do we go in?” she hisses. “She doesn’t _seem_ dangerous.”

“Neither did the apple tree,” mutters Jon. But they both know that’s not true; the twisted tree made them all uneasy from the very beginning. The spirit of the Shard wasted no time frightening them. Beatrice just seems sad. “Do you want me to go first?” Jon asks.

“Yes. It’ll look better if there’s someone on-camera.”

Jon snorts and goes before her into the carriage. Beatrice doesn’t seem to notice them until they’re level with her row of seats, and then she looks around. She doesn’t look quite as young as Melanie thought, much closer to their age than to being a teenager.

“Oh, hello,” she says. “How did your TV show work out?”

“We haven’t made it yet,” says Melanie. Gooseflesh crawls up her arms.

“Really?” Beatrice laughs. “How funny. Do you want to stay a while and chat?”

“No,” says Jon. “We’re looking for the driver.”

“All right. Good luck.”

There’s another Beatrice in the third carriage, still sitting in the same seat. She must be forty years old now, and she’s knitting. She looks up when the door opens, and beams at them. “Melanie! Jon! It’s been so long. I was beginning to think you wouldn’t visit again. Sit down. I wish I had something to offer you, but I don’t think I’ll ever be done with his scarf.”

Melanie and Jon exchange a look. _She knows our names_ , says Melanie’s look. _Indeed she does_ , says Jon’s. _Shall we sit?_

They sit across the carriage from her, and she smiles warmly at them again. “How long did you say you’ve been riding this train?” Jon asks.

“Since I was just a little girl. That must be… oh, thirty or forty years now? I never get tired of it. The same beautiful trees every day, rain or shine. And such lovely people, when they visit.”

“How long has it been since we visited you?” asks Melanie. The camera is steady on Beatrice, her sure quick hands and her inward-turned smile.

“Jon I haven’t seen for more than a moment in quite some time, but you were here just a few winters ago, my dear. I suppose you’ll remember in time. I rather miss you, even though you’re sitting right in front of me.” She sighs wistfully. “It’s like looking at an old photograph. You were even more beautiful when you were young.”

Melanie’s eyes are hot and she doesn’t know why. “I’m sorry,” she says, and stands up. “I’ll, um, see you later.” She shoves the camera at Jon and hurries toward the front of the train. She doesn’t want to see the old woman in the next carriage. She doesn’t want to know whether she’ll be greeted like an old friend or with the solemn sadness of someone who has been ignored for a very long time.

The younger Beatrice in the second carriage doesn’t have time to say a word as Melanie hurries through. The young girl in the first carriage doesn’t even seem to notice her as she edges around Tim and goes into the driver’s compartment. She can only hold her head in her hands, overwhelmed by the strange sad melancholy of this unused train that holds its past and its present side by side. She should come back. It doesn’t _have_ to be sad. But she can’t help imagining herself grown old, walking past the living memories of three Beatrices to speak to the one she’s known all this time. She can’t help imagining them watch her go by without speaking to them, wondering where their friend is going.

Basira comes in not too long after Melanie’s sat down, and leans against the wall. “What happened in there?” she asks.

“I… don’t know if I should say. I don’t know if I even could. Beatrice is, um, definitely a spirit, but not a bad one. I think… we’re going to be friends.” This last comes out in a whisper, because she can’t quite control her voice right now.

Basira gives her a rather odd look, but doesn’t say anything more. Her presence is comforting, at least, the fact that she’s anchored in the same time and place as Melanie. After a while she says, “We asked Beatrice if she was all right with this airing and she said it was fine. I guess if she’s a spirit she really doesn’t get out much.”

“No. No, she doesn’t.”

The sit in rather gloomy silence for a long time, passing stations overgrown with ivy where no-one waits. Finally the door opens again and Jon comes in, looking uncharacteristically… soft.

“There’s no driver in the last carriage either,” he says quietly.

“It took you nearly an hour to check?” says Basira. “How many carriages are there?”

“Just four for passengers. I was talking to Beatrice.”

“Did you see… me?” Melanie mutters, embarrassed to have even thought it but unable to shake the thought. Jon sliding open the door and stepping out of a place decades in the past, so much younger than she remembers him.

He just regards her levelly, and it’s her who looks away. “Stupid question anyway,” she whispers. “I hope you had a nice time.”

“We did.”

 

The second part of the episode is filmed in the near-abandoned train station at the end of the line; they spend an hour or so exploring its dilapidated interior and then go for lunch in a local pub. Melanie hangs back to let Basira and Sasha do most of the talking. It’s their episode at this point anyway. But the next day when they meet the ‘ghost station hunters’ Liz Moralee and Tim Hall-Smith in County Durham for an interview, she takes the lead again. Her strategy is to complete most of a normal interview and put them at their ease first—and they are lovely people, who could clearly talk all day about ghost trains. Then she asks,

“Have you ever met someone who couldn’t leave a train?”

Liz blinks at her in confusion, but Tim’s eyes narrow and he nods, apparently satisfied. “Once or twice. Where was it you said you were yesterday? Leeds to Goole? I’ve met her, yeah. Four times, and you know what I mean.”

“Are you trying to make me jealous?” says Liz with a smile. “Because it’s not working.”

“Not at all. If it makes you feel better there’s a gentleman ghost as well, on the… eh, what was it? Ardwick, I think.”

“Did you write that up for your site?” Melanie asks.

“Oh, no. That’s something that ought to be seen in person.”

“Do you remember her name?”

“B-something, I think. That was quite a while ago, a few years before I met Liz, so I’m afraid I don’t remember her well.”

“It was Beatrice.”

“Yes! That’s right. Beatrice. I never did figure out what was going on with train ghosts on the ghost trains, but there you are.”

For a moment Melanie wants to tell him everything, but it’s a stupid impulse. She hasn’t even told the rest of the crew, although Tim has all the footage, including the stuff she can’t watch that Jon took after she left. Beatrice feels like an intensely private thing that she wants to keep to herself forever and ever. So she says, “Thank you so much for talking to us. We’ll make sure to link to you on our site. We should probably let you go now, but before that, is there any last thing you’d like to say?”

Liz beams into the camera. “I think everyone should look all around them, every day, for forgotten things. They want to be remembered, you know, and I like to think they’re grateful to us when we do. Some of those things are train stations, and some aren’t. But they’re all so, so beautiful.”


	6. The Pits

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Underground, trapped, crushing

“I want to use the momentum from our last episode to do another kind of ghost train. As a warning, this is probably the dangerous kind of ghost train—Basira’s found a lot of rumors about accidents near Aldwych station, and I think we all know what rumors about accidents mean by this point.”

“Means wild horses couldn’t drag me down there,” says Tim, without looking up from drawing what seems to be a detailed reproduction of one of the towers of the St. Pancras Hotel.

“Right. And I’m okay with a camera, so we should be able to survive without Tim’s genius for half an episode, but I don’t want to bring anyone who can’t handle potentially being trapped underground.”

“I quite like small spaces,” Jon murmurs.

Melanie raises her eyebrows at Basira, who shakes her head and gives Melanie a _don’t look at me_ expression; at Sasha, who gives a thumbs up; then at Martin, who’s hunched into himself fretting. “You don’t have to come,” she tells him. “I’m not expecting you to.”

He swallows and looks up, his face set into a determined expression. “No, I’lll come. You hired me as a presenter and I’m not going to back out of that.”

It’s not Melanie’s job to call him out on doing things he doesn’t want to for the sake of imaginary peer pressure, so she just shrugs. “Right, then. Basira, can you help Jon with scripting and figure out how we can get in? And Martin, you and Sasha and I are going to come up with backup plans. And backup plans for our backup plans. And an equipment list in case we need to escape from a ghostly train tunnel.”

 

Tim comes with to film the outside of Aldwych station, and a bit of them inspecting it, trying to find any way in. Then he walks with them down to Holborn, salutes, and gives Melanie the camera. Then they start down the stairs; at this time of night there aren’t many people travelling, but certainly a few. Since Jon is actually here and on camera, he does his narration as they descend into the station. He’ll probably have to dub it over when the final script is done, but he is _very_ good.

“There were several deaths on the Aldwych Line, but the first and most famous documented death occurred in January 1991. Karolina Górka was found on an otherwise empty platform, crushed by the marquee that displayed arrival times. Because there are no witnesses and no security footage, it’s only a guess that it came loose and fell when an arriving train began to shake the tunnel. Since then Aldwych Station saw another death in 1993 when a commuter had a heart attack as a train pulled up, and in 1994, shortly before the line was closed down, a man who appeared to have been sleeping in the tunnels was run over by the train. Urban legend began to attribute these deaths to some common cause, some evil spirit; or to Górka herself, as some kind of vengeance for her death. Whether this is true… well, we’re about to find out.”

“Perfect,” Melanie whispers to him. “Martin, do you want to do the narration while we cross over?”

“Oh, um, sure.” He clears his throat. “So, we didn’t manage to find any maps, as such, that would help us get into the Aldwych branch, but we did find some pictures of the transition point online so we know what we’re looking for.” Melanie points the camera at the strange little door, all the way at the end of the tunnel. “Another shoutout to the Ghost Station Hunters for helping us out with this, they’re a really fantastic resource, although when Tim and Liz came back here three years ago they weren’t able to get in, we’re a little more committed to breaking and entering. Um, Basira’s been teaching us all how to pick locks.”

“I already knew how to pick locks,” says Melanie.

“Yes. So, here we are at the door to the Aldwych Line. As you can see, this used to be the tunnel the train went through, but the track has been removed and it’s been bricked up. However… Melanie, do you want to…?”

“Yeah, take the camera for a moment. Someone can get a closeup of me picking the lock, whoever feels steadier.” She reaches into the side pocket of her backpack for the lockpicks Basira lent her, waits until Sasha is in position, and starts working on the padlock on the door. It takes about five minutes and a lot of cursing, because she’s no expert, but it works out in the end. She pushes the door open with a flourish and says, “Welcome, lady and gentlemen, to the Aldwych Line.”

It’s not a long walk down the tunnel, shining their flashlights around the walls that look like skeletal ribs. At least until they get closer to the Aldwych platform, where the lights are still on.

“I don’t like this,” says Martin. “Why is it still powered? Why wouldn’t they have shut it down?”

“Maybe ghosts run on electricity,” Sasha suggests. “Or they can make it? What d’you think, Jon?”

“The electricity may not be on at all,” says Jon, who’s out in front looking around into the corner of the platform. “It’s possible that we only perceive the station to be lit because the spirit of this place wants us to.”

“I wish you hadn’t said that,” says Martin quietly.

But nothing too terrible happens. They climb up onto the platform and film everything: the water-stained walls, the peeling advertisements for things you could buy in 1994, the strangely flat reverb in the narrow space. It feels to Melanie as if it’s getting smaller every time she measures it again with her eyes, but she tries to put that out of her mind as the four of them leave the platform to try and pry open the lift, which is absolutely papered with adverts. They take the stairs instead up to the turnstiles and the ticketing office. The eerie thing isn’t that it looks abandoned; it’s that it looks like nobody happens to be here right now, but come morning it will fill up with commuters again. Aldwych Station is just waiting for a train.

After maybe twenty minutes of filming up at street level (and failing to figure out how to open the metal slats blocking the entrance) they decide that there’s probably nothing here at all and start back down the stairs. “The deaths _were_ twenty years ago,” Sasha says, as if to reassure herself.

“Right,” says Martin, who’s looking significantly more cheerful. “And sometimes deaths really are just—”

He stops dead and Jon bangs into him from the back. When Melanie peers around him out of the narrow hallway, there’s a train waiting at the platform. The lights are on inside, and all the doors stand open. Warily Melanie paces to the front, where once again there’s no driver; she shakes her head and jogs back to the others.

“I’m not getting on there,” says Martin.

“No,” says Sasha, “I think that would be kind of a stupid idea. Um, spirit, if you want to talk to us, you can come out here.”

Inside the train a figure Melanie hadn’t noticed before stands up. But it doesn’t get out. It just turns to face them through the window, which is so grimy Melanie can’t make out its face at all.

“Jon, what are you _doing_?” Sasha cries.

Jon doesn’t turn around, but he does say, “I have the handheld camera, and I honestly don’t mind. None of you needs to put yourself in danger.” Sasha makes an abortive lunge for him but stops short as he steps into the carriage, biting her lip.

“Jon,” she growls, under her breath. “You stupid…” She shakes her head and goes to stand half-in, half-out of the door. Melanie runs to peer in past her, as does Martin after a moment.

“Karolina?” Jon is saying. “Karolina Górka?” Melanie cranes her neck, but it’s not until she actually sticks her head in that she can see the face that’s grown familiar from all the newspaper clippings she’s read, the unmistakeable wide-set eyes and masses of wavy brown hair piled over Karolina’s shoulders.

“You can call us that if you like,” she says. “We’re not her, but it’s as good a face as any. It’s the one people want us to wear. Will you sit down?”

“No offense,” says Jon, “but I prefer to be able to run.”

“Oh,” says the spirit, thoughtfully. “Guess we can’t have that.” And the train slides into motion, with a horrible screeching noise.

Sasha glances wildly over her shoulder at Melanie as the door begins to close. “Sorry,” she says, and jumps into the train. Melanie follows her, cursing, and to her surprise Martin shoves in after her, nearly getting caught in the door as it closes. They all land in a heap on the gritty floor, Melanie squashed between Martin and Sasha.

Jon (after being yelled at) lends a hand to try and disentangle them, upon which Martin notices the good camera has been slightly sat on and starts fussing over it instead of confronting the situation. Melanie looks around the carriage: everything looks a bit like the train was excavated from the bottom of a lake at some point. Every crack and corner is dark with grit, and all the plastic sheaths that adverts could be slid into are packed with dirt instead. Now that she can get a closer look, the spirit _also_ looks like she’s been dug out of a hole. Her hair is dusty, her clothes coated in dried mud; her hands are folded neatly in front of her, so Melanie can see that her fingernails are short and cracked and there’s dirt under them, as if she’s been digging with her bare hands. It doesn’t make _sense_ , because Górka didn’t die in a collapse, she died when a sign fell on her.

“Why is the train full of mud?” Melanie asks.

The spirit looks blankly at her. “We are underground.”

“Yeah, but in a concrete—”

“We have been underground for a long time. Packed together until our bones interlock.” The lights flicker, and for a moment Melanie thinks she can see the skull under the spirit’s face. That’s _good_ cinema, and she’s as pissed off as she is frightened because there’s a good chance they’re never going to be able to publish this. Because they’ll be dead.

“The plague pits,” says Jon. The train groans, not as if it’s stopping but as if it’s being squeezed. He ignores it in favor of talking more quickly. “Basira was talking about how much of the city is underlain by the mass graves of plague victims from the outbreak in 1665. And people say the underground had to detour around them because they were impossible to excavate. But nobody’s ever been able to prove that it actually had anything to do with that.”

“Do you think that matters?” says the spirit. “People bring us into the underground in their hearts. And we bring the pits to them.” The train groans again, or rather it shrieks. And the front of the carriage visible buckles inward. The spirit seems untroubled by the train crumpling inward around it, but Martin backs all the way to the far end of the carriage. “We’re supposed to kill people,” it says. It advances, and the other three back up.

“Y-you don’t have to—ah!” Jon stumbles over a part of the floor that juts inward and falls. Melanie darts forward to try and pull him up, but the middle of the carriage crumples very suddenly, and she can no longer stand fully upright or get out. The spirit slithers through the narrow irregular space to pass them, and behind it the front of the carriage squashes into nothing like tin foil. Jon is crying. Behind Melanie, the train screeches again, and Sasha screams.

“You don’t even want to be doing this!” Martin yells, faint and muffled beyond the collapsed section of the train. There’s silence for a moment, and, surprised, he says, “N-nobody says they’re _supposed_ to kill people if… if they really want to.”

“How does wanting enter into it? It’s what we’re supposed to do.”

“Well, I mean, who told you you have to? Who’s going to t-tell a, a bunch of skeletons what to do?”

“The nature of our existence, Martin Blackwood, is tied to others’ perception of us.”

“A lot of humans think that way too! But, I mean, that doesn’t stop people from—from wearing really weird clothes, or coming out as gay even if it’s dangerous, or—I don’t know, running away from their family to become a farmer? Of course we’re shaped by how people see us, but, it doesn’t have to be the only thing that shapes us. Obviously I don’t know exactly how it works for spirits, but you might as well try, right? What have _you_ got to lose?”

There’s silence again, except for Melanie’s own loud breathing in her ears and the sound of Jon trying to stifle his panicked whimpers. _I hired you for exactly this situation, Martin. Please, let it listen._ She squeezes Jon’s hand, which is the only point of contact she managed before the train tried to crush them. He squeezes back until her hand aches, but she doesn’t stop him.

“It might be interesting to try,” says the spirit finally.

“S-so you’ll let us go?” There’s another long pause, and then Martin says, “Hello? Um, spirit?” He mutters something quietly that Melanie can’t make out through the several feet of crumpled metal, and then says, “Sasha? Are you all right?”

“Been better,” says Sasha’s strained voice. “Can you try and bend this bit? I’m mostly worried I’ll cut myself on it when I try to get out, and I don’t have leverage.”

There are a few minutes of grunting and then a sudden scramble that Melanie takes to be Sasha getting free. “Jon? Melanie? How are you doing in there?”

“C-could be worse,” says Jon. His hand has relaxed a little, but he hasn’t let go of Melanie.

“Very slightly better than him,” she says.

It takes a long time to pass their backpacks through and squirm out past the jagged, twisted metal, and by the end she and Jon are both scratched, sweaty, and aching. It’s just lucky they’re both so small. It’s _not_ luck that they brought water and antiseptic cream for this exact situation.

Martin pries open the door with a crowbar ( _thank you_ , Basira) and they all spill out into the narrow space between the tunnel wall and the side of the train. From out here Melanie can see that the tunnel itself has crushed inward into the front of the train. Martin points the camera with its attached light up at the earthen ceiling, picking out old yellow-white bones: part of a ribcage, a skull half-buried in the wall.

Jon doesn’t make Melanie let go of his hand all the way up to the surface, into the cool, free night air.


	7. Ghost Storey

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've always been fascinated by Tim's insistence that he never resented his perfect brother. Wow, I thought, that must be a pretty fraught relationship. And according to my own fanfiction, I was right!

“Hey, loyal viewers, it’s your mate Tim. This is kind of a solo thing I’m doing. You’ll notice I’m not using the nice camera today, ‘cause Melanie will kill me if a ghost breaks it, so this is the old one me and Danny used to use for shooting parkour videos. Say hi, Danny!”

Another man bends into view to wave sideways at the camera. If possible, he’s even handsomer than Tim. “Hello. I’m visiting from Leeds, pretty excited to be here with my big brother. I’d always be dragging him around for shoots and now he’s doing the same to me!”

“Shut up, man.” The camera shakes a little and then steadies again as they begin to cross Euston Road. “So here we are outside the St. Pancras Renaissance London Hotel.”

“The guy who designed it was actually sort of enemies with one of our favorite architects, Sir Robert Smirke.”

“Yeah, we refuse to mention the name of the St. Pancras architect because he was a bit of a knob. He completely ignored the instructions and designed a building with like twice as many rooms as they asked for and more floors than they could afford. Of course, they built it anyway, because look at it, it’s amazingly cool! But the interesting thing is, even though they could only afford to build four storeys, most of their publicity material showed the five storeys that appeared in the original plan.”

“Would you say that what we have on our hands here, Tim, is a ghost storey?”

The camera shakes again as Tim laughs. It steadies to show the walk through the main entrance into the lobby and Tim says, “I absolutely would, Danny.”

Tim’s hand comes into view to press the up button on the elevator, but they quickly realize the problem; the camera zooms in on the card reader that locks access to the third and fourth floors. “Uh-oh,” says Danny. “Don’t worry. I have a lot of experience getting into housing blocks I don’t have a key to. Can we just cut to the bit where we’ve already done that?”

“Yeah, we want to be giving people ideas about how _ethical_ it is to sneak into super luxury condos hunting an entire ghost floor, not how to actually _do_ it.”

The camera cuts to black for a second, and then to a shot of a long, tastefully-furnished hallway. “All right!” says Danny. “Here we are on the third floor. Now we just have to find a stairway up.”

“Sure, but what if we don’t?” Tim asks as they walk. “I mean, most of the residents probably would have noticed by now if there was another floor above them.”

“Tim, Tim, Tim. Sweet Tim. Rich people _love_ following posted signs. None of them is going to try to get up on the roof.”

Tim laughs again, and then the shot cuts to a door opening into a stairway. The camera zooms in on the sign hung primly over the chain across the stairs up: NO ROOF ACCESS. Tim turns the camera on his own face to waggle his eyebrows at it; Danny joins him, and the shot cuts again when they start to laugh too hard to keep the camera still.

Now Danny steps carefully over the chain; Tim hands him the camera and follows. The camera points up the stairs as they walk, and then settles on the sign that reads FLOOR FOUR.

“Ghost storey,” whispers Danny. The camera sees his hand pushing open the door, and then a hallway nearly identical to the third floor, except with portraits lining the walls. It looks a bit like a palace.

“Bit disappointing so far,” says Tim. “Just more flats. You think anyone will answer if we knock?” Danny can be heard laughing as the camera approaches the first door on the left and Tim knocks with his free hand. Then, muffled, someone calls out,

“Just a moment!”

“Oh shit!” whispers Tim. “Do we ding-dong-ditch or what?”

“You do that and you’ll never hear the end of it.”

“I just want to make sure you remember the time I was almost killed by a ghost?”

“I—I know, I do, Tim, and I’m sorry. You can leave if you want, but leave me the camera.”

A frustrated sigh from Tim. “I’m not leaving my stupid brother to get murdered by ghosts. At least we’ll die together.”

“Aw, Timmy, we’re not gonna die—good afternoon, sir!”

The camera jerks away from Danny’s face and steadies on the person standing in the doorway, a man in an honest-to-goodness dressing gown, who says in a genteel accent, “Can I help you?”

“Could we interview you?” asks Danny brightly. “About what it’s like to live here? It’s for a show we do.”

“Oh, my, of course. Do come in. A show! Are you with the television? That’s rather exciting.” The man turns away to go back into his flat, leaving the door open behind him, and Tim takes the opportunity to whisper,

“I don’t like this.”

“Sit down, sit down. Would you like any coffee? I wasn’t expecting to entertain today, but I may be able to find some biscuits somewhere. Sometimes it feels like an archaeological expedition just to find where I’ve put anything!”

“It’s fine,” says Tim, and although the camera isn’t pointed at his face it’s clear he’s fake smiling. “What’s your name, by the way?”

“Bertie Caruthers! So pleased to meet you. And you are…?”

“Danny Stoker, and this is my brother Tim.”

“How long have you lived here?” Tim asks. He sets the camera down on the arm of his chair so that it has a view of Bertie lighting an actual Bunsen burner under his coffee pot.

“Quite some time! My aunt made a present of it to me—I wonder if you’re heard of her? Grace Caruthers? No? Well, I don’t suppose you’re exactly ‘high society.’ I have nothing against the working class, of course! I only don’t come into much contact with you. But you’re perfectly pleasant people, perfectly pleasant.”

“Don’t get out much, eh?” says Tim.

“There’s simply so much to do right here at home. I’m a writer, you see.”

“What do you think of your downstairs neighbors? See them often?” Tim is starting to sound jovially aggressive, or perhaps aggressively jovial.

“Er, they’re lovely people, I’m sure. Is there something wrong with them, Mr. Stoker?”

“Not at all. Sorry, I just wanted to make sure—what floor is this, that we’re on? I’d get lost on a straight road.”

“The fourth floor…?”

“Tim, stop being an ass. I’m so sorry for him, Mr. Caruthers. I don’t know what’s gotten into him today. He’s usually so well-behaved.”

“I’m not your dog, Danny,” Tim mutters.

“You were the one who didn’t want to make anyone _angry_ who lives here,” whispers Danny, “or have you forgotten why you didn’t want to come?”

Bertie clears his throat, looking vexed, but behind the camera Tim and Danny don’t seem to notice.

“No, I haven’t forgotten. Not for one moment. _You_ just never take anything seriously, even when I—”

“Excuse me!” says Bertie, drawing himself up. Behind him the water is boiling. “You are _ruining_ my interview! I have been nothing but polite to you. I have so few visitors up here, and when someone is finally ready to give me a bit of publicity—and that is all I ask!—it’s _you two_. Where is your professionalism? Where is your civility? Your self-control? I have had it up to HERE with you. Especially you, _Tim_.”

Bertie raises a hand to his face, puckered in consternation, and _rips it off_. There’s a different face underneath, raw and red and very angry.

“Shit!” yells one of the brothers, and the camera is plucked off the arm of the chair. The next minute or so of footage is total nonsense, but Tim and Danny’s panicked breathing can be heard, and every so often one of them will say “What the hell? Where are the stairs!” or “Was this _here_ before?!”

Finally the screen goes dark with a bang, and it’s clear they’re not running any more. “Did you see it behind us?” whispers Danny.

“I wasn’t _looking_ behind us. I was just trying to get the hell away.”

“Turn on the light on the camera.”

After a moment of noise the picture returns; the camera is pointed at Tim’s knees. He shines the light around what seems to be a sort of broom closet, with one difference: instead of brooms, every free bit of floor and shelf is crammed with sketches and paintings, all portraits. All of their eyes seem to be fixed directly on the camera.

“What the _hell_?” says Danny. Tim quickly shushes him. “Okay,” he says more quietly, “but what the hell? This isn’t Scooby Doo.”

“Ghost building, Danny. Who’s to say they haven’t seen Scooby Doo?”

“They’re permanently stuck in the fucking Victorian period so I don’t know why they would have. Dammit. Okay, fine. It’s not like they can hurt us, they’re just creepy pictures.”

“Don’t tempt fate,” Tim mutters. “You think we can leave soon?”

“That depends,” says voice that is recognizably Bertie’s, and on the periphery of the camera Danny looks around wildly. “Are you going to play nice?” The camera focuses on one of the paintings on the high shelf; its mouth moves when it speaks, but it doesn’t move _right_. “Are you going to go out and tell everyone about this place? Are you going to show them how beautiful I am?”

“Are you—are you planning on trapping them if they see our show and come?” asks Tim.

“That depends too.” The portrait-Bertie’s smile widens. “It depends on how many people come.”

“ _Lots_ will come,” Danny promises. “We’re kind of a big deal, so plenty of people will see our show. And you’re so beautiful there’s no way they won’t want to visit.” He stands, and Tim adjusts the camera to center both him and the picture as he stretches to take it down from the shelf. He holds the painting in front of him at eye level, as if he’s speaking to a real person. It’s clearly looking at him, but because it’s flat it also looks eerily like it’s still staring into the camera. “If we take you with us, will you tell us the way out?” asks Danny.

“Of course! How can I disbelieve a promise like that from such an earnest young man? Open the door, and turn left.”

The door opens and Tim comes out into a hall that is empty except for the portraits. They turn their heads to follow the party’s progress, and when Tim turns the camera on one of them she blows a kiss.

They walk down the long hall to the stairwell door. The camera focuses on Danny’s hands hanging up Bertie’s portrait on a conveniently empty hook next to it. “Remember,” he says. “Tell them about me. Tell them to come. I cannot be forgotten.”

“We’ll remember,” says Danny, and then he pushes the door open and the camera cuts to black.

The picture returns to show Tim and Danny sitting at an outdoor table at a café that might be on the same street. Tim, who’s just turned it on, leans back and folds his arms with a sigh. “So, yeah,” he says. “That’s the St. Pancras Renaissance London Hotel. Don’t go there. Don’t sneak in, and if you do, _really_ don’t go to the fourth floor.”

“I don’t know,” says Danny. “It was just lonely. I bet as long as  you promised to make a blog post about it, it’d let you go.”

“You could also get arrested! Or, and I want to emphasize that this could very much happen to you, you could get trapped there and forced to have coffee with a simulacrum of a man who never existed until you starve to death because ghost food isn’t real. This isn’t a game, Danny. Come on.”

Danny raises his eyebrows. “Well, this has been a Stoker Brothers production, and no matter what you choose to do vis-à-vis the ghost storey of St. Pancras, remember to like, comment, subscribe, and share so we can make good on our promise of making it internet famous. Bye!”


	8. Graveworms

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Then it is a dead god, decayed and clammy corpse-flesh brimming with writhing graveworms."

“It wasn’t like this when I inherited it,” Mr. Prentiss explains for the camera. “My father used to own the building, and I got it when he died in 2006. At that point there were still tenants in all the units. There wasn’t ever really an event… it just got worse and worse. More people would call about infestations, more people would leave when their leases were up. And the peculiar thing is how many of them seemed to think it had something to do with the cemetery. Grave worms, they said. It’s not that it’s hard to get by with all the units empty—I own other buildings—but the, um, legal side is a little more worrying. Even one death can get you tangled up in litigation for years.”

“Grave worms,” Jon mutters angrily under his breath. “It’s an _excellent_ cemetery.” Melanie squints at him in confusion. He’s not known to be overly defensive about the merits of graveyards.

“What did they die of?” asks Martin, rather loudly over him.

“Officially, blood poisoning from an unknown source. Unofficially, I’m sure it has something to do with the grave worms. The way his skin looked…” Prentiss swallows and looks away from the camera for a moment. “I-I should tell you, there was the tenant, and then there was my daughter. They died the same way—she, um, she liked it here. But the police didn’t get involved in Jane’s death. I dream about her sometimes, and you know, I don’t believe in ghosts, but whenever I come to this building I could swear I can hear her walking around the upper floors. I know her tread… I’m probably just crazy, but what if I’m not?”

“You’re not crazy, Mr. Prentiss,” says Martin gently. “Whether other people can see her or not, Jane is still here.” He glances up at the strange, hypnotically striped masses of paper that seem to ooze down over the front of the building. “I assume you’ve tried to get normal exterminators to look at it?”

“Oh, yes. They never find anything. They’ve cleared off the nests a couple of times, but they’re always back within the week. They’re not normal wasps. I’ve never _seen_ a wasp here.”

“We’ll do what we can,” Martin promises. “You want to stay out here?”

“You couldn’t pay me to go in.”

The five of them—the whole team minus Sasha, who is staying at home to catch up on her admin work—stand at the threshold of the house, feeling Mr. Prentiss’ gaze on their backs. “Nobody is required to go in,” Melanie tells them in a low voice. “In fact, it would make me feel a bit better if someone volunteered to stay outside, in case we need… I don’t know, to get our corpses picked up.”

“If you’re asking for volunteers,” says Martin, sounding relieved. “Let me know if the spirit needs talking down, though?”

“Right. Will do. Now, it’s pretty likely this is a spirit that feeds on fear, so just… try not to be afraid.”

“Easy,” says Tim with his signature false cheer. “If you see any ghost worms, just remember, they’re more scared of you than you are of them!”

Melanie slaps him on the back and walks past him into the building. “That’s the spirit.”

The inside is, if possible, even more heavily coated with paper wasps’ nests in upsettingly organic swirling patterns. They cling in the corners. They drip down the walls. They block up the doorways. It feels like a place that’s been abandoned for decades, not just three years. Some of the furniture is overturned and on its way to being swallowed, and everything seems to be covered in a layer of grime. It reminds Melanie forcefully of pictures she’s seen of long-abandoned hospitals.

“Jane,” she calls up the stairs, not yet setting foot on them. “Jane Prentiss? Are you here?”

In the ringing silence, they can all clearly hear the sound of footsteps creaking over the ceiling above them.

“She’s not going to come down here,” says Basira. “That’s not how this works. She draws us further into the building, cuts off our escape routes—”

“Are you trying to freak us out?” Tim demands. “We’re supposed to _not_ be scaring ourselves.

Jon just starts walking up the stairs, ignoring the argument, and Melanie follows him.

On the first floor, there’s no sign of anyone. They pause again: footsteps on the second floor. Melanie is beginning to feel as if they _are_ being lured somewhere, but she refuses to be scared. Uneasy, at worst. About the, the state of the stairs. Are they still up to code? Someone could fall down them if the bannisters are as rotten as they look.

There’s no sign of Jane in the second floor hall, either, but it’s not a long hall and the doors to the two units are locked when Basira tries them. “You reckon we should go in?” she asks. “It won’t take me that long, they’re simple locks.”

“Yeah, all right.” It will make more interesting footage, anyway. Melanie looks around behind them, but nothing is moving on the stairs.

Number 5 is almost completely bare inside; all the furniture has been removed, and there’s nothing more than an unplugged refrigerator.

“Does anyone think it’s weird that we haven’t actually seen this supposed worm infestation?” asks Tim as he pans around the room. “I’m starting to think it’s actually an infestation of empty wasp nests.”

“Can you hear something?”

“Cut it out, Jon.”

“No, listen.”

They fall still, heads tilted. There is a faint rustling coming from somewhere closer to the entrance. “Ugh, it’s in the fridge, isn’t it,” says Tim. “Of course it’s in the fridge. We’re going to open that thing and a ton of worms are going to come out. I hate this place.”

Basira opens the door of the fridge. Inside, it’s packed solid with wasps’ nests. She keeps the door open just long enough to watch little black heads begin to wriggle out of the irregular holes, and then slams it shut. “Yep,” she says breathlessly. “You were completely right about that. We should leave. Regroup.” She leads the way out the door of the apartment and starts down the stairs.

On the ground floor, standing in front of the closed front door, is a woman. She’s unnaturally pale and her dark hair looks filthy, but Melanie can’t see any sign of whatever Mr. Prentiss said happened to her skin. The four of them skid to a stop a few meters away from her, watching her warily. She just looks at them.

“Er, hello,” says Melanie at last. “Is there any chance you could let us by?”

“Can you hear them singing?”

“Get out of the way,” says Tim. “We don’t have time for your spooky ghost bullshit. You can come if you like, apologize to your dad for ruining his building, but we’re not afraid of you.”

“They are hungry.”

And then her skin begins to break open and little black heads emerge as if they’re chewing their way out of her. She closes her eyes and smiles like a saint in ecstasy as they begin to drop to the floor from her bare outstretched arms and from underneath her dress. Tim backs into Melanie, pushing everyone back toward the stairs, but Basira yelps, “There’s more coming from up there!”

So they flee _down_ instead, as more worms than could possibly fit inside a person pour out of the ghost of Jane Prentiss. Tim slams the basement door shut behind them, and Jon and Basira hunt through the basement to find something to stuff under it, lit only by the light attached to the camera.

There is, more or less, silence in the basement. Then Jon says, “What are we going to do?”

“There’s windows,” says Basira; she touches the camera to guide its beam of light over to the western wall. They’re so caked with grime that no light comes through them even though it’s barely dusk. “We can climb out if we pull the washer over.”

“Sure as hell beats waiting for worms to chew their way through all the towels and eat us,” says Tim. “You want to go first, breaking and entering specialist?”

“Breaking and exiting,” Basira says. “Help me get this over there.”

They try to ignore the spirit’s muffled singing just outside the door as they push the coin-operated washer up to the wall. Basira crouches on it, cursing as she struggles with the rusted latch, but finally manages to get the window open in a shower of wet dirt, cold air, and dead sowbugs. She wriggles out onto the ground, and Tim passes through the camera before going up himself. As Jon climbs onto the washer Melanie looks behind her. It’s far too dark to see anything in the basement without the camera’s light, but she can hear the rustling noise growing louder, as if the worms have made it through the barricade. “Go, go, go,” she hisses at Jon. “They’ve gotten in.”

“I’m going as fast as I can! Ow. Stop pulling.”

Melanie gets out her phone for at least a little light. They’re coming across the floor toward her in a tide, followed by the stumbling form that constitutes, at most, 40% of a human, it’s so full of holes. One of its eyes is missing now, with worms still dropping out the socket and onto the floor. Melanie climbs backward onto the washer (knocking into Jon’s legs) and draws up her feet before she takes a picture.

“I’m through!” Jon gasps. “Don’t just sit there!”

She hurls her phone and crawls up onto the dirt. Tim and Basira haul her through, and she lies on the ground for a moment, gasping. Then Tim scoops her up and turns to run the other way. “She’s at the window!” he calls.

“I’ll close it,” says Basira. “Jon, go!”

Tim doesn’t turn around until he’s a good fifty meters into the cemetery, at which point Melanie whacks him on the arm and says, “Put me down. I’m not hurt.”

He puts her down and films Jon and then Basira running to join them. Jon is really not much of a runner. Maybe Melanie should start a mandatory team jog to train up for fleeing for their lives on a regular basis.

Just as the others arrive, a terribly familiar voice speaks behind them. “You running from the wasp house?”

Melanie spins around to see her father standing there, leaning against one of the gravestones. This has got to be a hallucination. It can’t even be a ghost, because her dad wasn’t buried in Oxford.

“Georgie!” says Jon in surprise. Melanie looks at him in disbelief.

“You—you knew my dad? Only my mum called him that.”

“What?”

“Everyone shut up a minute,” says Basira. They shut up, including Melanie’s dad, who raises his eyebrows and leans forward a bit, just like he always did when he was listening closely. “You two aren’t seeing the same person. I know, because when I look at whatever’s standing there, I see my gran.”

“I’m sorry,” says Melanie’s dad. “I don’t normally meet groups of people unless they’re all mourning the same person. I only wanted to make sure you were safe from the wasp house.”

“Can’t you look like someone else,” mutters Tim. He’s turned away, looking off toward the road.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t. I can’t choose how I appear to you. I’m sorry if it causes you pain.”

“Are you saying… that Georgie is dead?” asks Jon.

Melanie’s dad turns to look at him thoughtfully. “We don’t only mourn those whose bodies have died,” he says. “We also mourn the people who have become dead to us because we believe we’ll never see them again. But in your case, Jon, she never existed. There was only ever me.”

“You—what?”

“You’d lost so many people, but you weren’t grieving for them. You didn’t want to see them. You were mourning someone who never existed. So I became that person, for you.”

“I don’t… who was I grieving, then?”

“A sister. Someone certain. Someone who understood you the way your gran never did. A friend.”

Jon steps forward to clasp the spirit’s hands, and Melanie has to look away too so that she won’t see Jon having a tender moment with her father. It’s too weird. “Thank you, Georgie,” he says softly. “I’ll come and visit. I’ve spent too long away, haven’t I?”

“I’d like that.”

 

“What’s in that house is not your daughter,” Melanie tells Mr. Prentiss. “It’s a malevolent spirit pretending to be her. Your daughter is resting safely, and do you want to know how I know?”

He nods, uncertain.

“We met her in the graveyard. You said she liked this place, right? That’s she stayed here, even though she’s not buried here.”

She leads Mr. Prentiss through the lichgate and to a grove of leafless trees crowded around a small hill. The graveyard spirit is standing there, still looking like Melanie’s father, and she has to avert her eyes as he rushes down to embrace Mr. Prentiss. They stand a ways away, so as not to hear what passes between Mr. Prentiss and his dead girl. But they do see the spirit evaporate into the cold air like a cloud of breath before he returns with red-rimmed eyes.

 

(If anyone were watching when the building is demolished two weeks later, they would see the wormhole-riddled Jane Prentiss and her father standing at the border wall of the graveyard, embracing for the last time as she falls to her knees and vanishes. But no-one is watching. Only a black cat will walk away from the rubble of the building, back into the graveyard, unnoticed by any mortal eye.)


	9. Narrower and Narrower

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> underwater, trapped, depths;  
> the gang visits Bolton Strid

It’s not really a surprise that the graveyard spirit doesn’t show up on film, but the _way_ it doesn’t show up is much more interesting than Melanie would have come up with if she were trying to design cost-saving special effects. It’s a vaguely human-shaped form of no clear size, fuzzed around the edges with dark static. The figure itself is a hole cut into the picture, revealing the previous video, which is the six of them planning this outing. In the finished episode it gives an eerie impression of prophecy, since that same video shows up in the credits segment. The camera, too, saw a ghost in a way. But no sound accompanies the video, and the spirit has no voice, just a wash of distant static that sounds almost like the sea.

Tim gets a lot of praise for his special effects, and quickly gets tired of explaining that the footage is almost completely untampered with and none of it is CG. By the time episode 16 is released he’s sarcastically replying to those comments by suggesting he’s a literal wizard. This being the internet, a lot of people explain to him that wizards aren’t real, and he finally gives up and leaves it to Sasha.

For this reason Tim is actually quite cheerful about the prospect of taking a road trip to northern Scotland to see some snow and investigate the source of a scream that can be heard from miles and miles around on the same day every year. That day is actually in August, but Elias thinks the show could use a change of scenery, and, well, he was willing to fund it. They’re going to pick up Tim’s brother in Leeds, as he’s sort of an expert on camping and hiking safety… and he can lend them some tents.

He ends up convincing them to stop by Bolton Strid, which is ‘absolutely on the way’ and ‘we don’t have anything else to do for the rest of today anyway.’ Personally Melanie was kind of looking forward to hanging out in a pub or something, as it’s cold and rainy. But she is ever in pursuit of the truth.

Sasha, Basira, and Jon elect to stay at Danny’s instead of going out in this weather. At least they’ve promised to make an elaborate meal for when the away party returns, freezing and possibly pursued by ghosts.

The strid itself is in a little patch of forest that’s probably lovely in the summer, but in February it looks a bit sad and creepy. Tim tells them to walk cautiously and look around a lot, to fit in with the atmosphere. It’s _funny_ ,  but Melanie can’t quite bring herself to laugh. Maybe it’s just the fact that she’s going through the motions already, but she’s starting to feel paranoid about every dip in the ground, as if she could fail to notice the strid and step in by accident.

It makes itself known, though, by the wide dell it flows through, and the soft shushing noise as it runs between the moss-covered stones of the bank. “Here we are,” says Danny cheerfully. “Who wants to jump over it?” Silence, as they stare at him in disbelief. “Fine, then, I’ll do it. You’ve forced my hand.”

“Danny,” Tim starts.

“No, look, I’m the parkour champion! Tell you what, I’ll wear a harness. You can tie it to one of those trees over there. Yes, I brought fifty meters of rope, and a wetsuit. Who do you honestly think I am?”

“It’s four degrees out!”

“Wetsuits are very warm. Come on, Tim, help tie it on.” He dumps his backpack onto the ground and starts rummaging through it. He comes up with a huge, heavy coil of rope and steers Tim over to the trees.

Martin and Melanie exchange a look. “If there _is_ a spirit here,” he says, “there’s literally no way he’s not going to fall in. We should stop him.”

Melanie struggles with herself. They _should_ stop him. No episode is worth someone potentially dying. But if he makes it… nobody’s _ever_ made it out of the strid alive. Viewers will forgive anything as long as it turned out all right in the end. So what she says, finally, is, “Dignity of risk, Martin. If Danny wants to be an idiot with a deathwish, he’s going to find a way to do it. We can make sure he lives.” She’s aware it’s the argument she made to Sam to get tips on defying ghosts. Whatever. It’s multipurpose.

Martin scowls at her.

“All right!” Danny calls as he jogs over. He’s shed all his clothes; apparently he was wearing a wetsuit underneath the entire time. “Ready for the hop? D’you know, it’s called a strid ‘cause you can step over it in one stride?”

“Yes, Danny, we’re all very impressed with your cavalier attitude toward your potential death. Oh for—it’s like you _want_ to fall in.” This is in response to Danny strapping a small waterproof camera to his head. He grins at Tim, pats him on the shoulder, and starts making small warmup jumps by the edge of the water.

“Ready, Timmy?”

“I’m going to murder you if you live.”

Danny hops to the far side. After all the preparation he did, it’s a complete anticlimax. “Well,” says Tim. “That was underwhelming, which is a huge relie—”

And then Danny hops in. Neatly, without a splash. The rope, which had a few meters of slack, suddenly pulls taut. “Danny! You—”

“Tim, what the hell is that?” Martin cries. He’s pointing up the slope on the opposite side of the river, where a white horse is standing among the trees.

“Brilliant,” says Tim savagely. “Now we’ve confirmed there really is a fucking spectral horse that appears when someone dies in the fucking strid. Help me pull him _out_!”

Tim shoves the camera into Melanie’s arms, and he and Martin get hold of the rope. She’d like to help, but she weighs about a third of what either of them do, so she just tries to get a good shot of them struggling against the force of the current. With two of them it’s not all that long before Danny’s head breaks the surface. They pull until he can wrap himself around one of the larger moss-covered rocks by the edge of the stream, gasping in what Melanie eventually realizes is incredulous laughter.

Tim hoists him to his feet, but he’s only interested in the camera. “Melanie,” he says, staggering toward her. “I saw something. I have to tell you right now. Look at my face.” She focuses the camera on him, with his scowling brother half out-of-frame.

“It’s not like we thought down there. All this?” He stamps weakly on the ground, completely failing to notice Martin tucking a jacket around his shaking shoulders. “It’s all holes. Underneath there are these… I can’t…” He sweeps a hand, frustrated, through his wet hair. “Listen, okay? They’re trapped. They’re still down there. Alive.”

“I think that maybe we should go back to the car and—”

“Look at my footage! You’ll see! They’re alive down there!”

“Danny, we can always come back. I can’t look at your footage without my laptop anyway, and it’s in the car.”

“Fine, fine, fine,” Danny mutters. He keeps chuntering under his breath as they untie him from the tree, and as Martin picks up his pack since Tim refuses to let him go even for a second.

When Melanie looks back, the white horse is still watching them from across the dell. She zooms in on it. And deliberately, as if it was waiting, it evaporates. She doesn’t like the damn thing. What was it doing? It must be the spirit of this place, but all it did was watch.

In the van they wrap Danny in coats as he fumbles, frozen-fingered, for the SD card to transfer the video. Melanie sets her laptop on the middle armrest in the front, and the four of them crowd around to watch.

When the camera turns on Danny is already bouncing up and down. The picture steadies and he looks back toward Melanie and Martin, standing on the bank wiith looks of deep skepticism on their faces. Then the camera points down to make sure of his footing. He hops over the strid, looks back at them. Melanie tenses.

The picture rises in a rapid blur and goes dark. There’s a moment of confusion, and the blurred shapes of Danny’s hands can be seen flailing past it… and then everything seems to slow. The camera picks up a cold blue light that shouldn’t be coming through the clear water: shafts of it lance down from somewhere, though there’s no clear surface, just the dark looming forms of the rocks. The camera turns to see Danny’s hands grasping at the rope, clearly trying to climb it but unable to against the force of the invisible current.

As he looks around, into the darkness, it begins to resolve. The stream flows through an extremely narrow cleft in the rock—downward, it gets narrower without ever quite making a bottom—but there are other cracks coming off it. Whatever inexplicable light illuminates the scene, it doesn’t touch the absolute blackness of those crevices. Except the almost fluorescently white eyes staring out of them, and the occasional flash of pale skin as someone or something reaches a hand toward Danny. Danny tries to reach out toward it too, but it’s clear he’s pushing against a strong current. What follows is almost five minutes of him trying to wedge himself into the narrow cleft so that he can climb forward against it, looking around occasionally at the bright white eyes staring out from every side, even below where it narrows even further.

And then the camera jerks, and slowly Danny is pulled upward, inch by painful inch, until his head breaks the surface. Melanie pauses it there. They all turn to look at Danny.

“Those… weren’t people, Danny,” says Tim.

“They were still _alive_ ,” Danny insists, but he sounds less manic than confused now.

“Those things were never alive.”

Danny curls into himself, frowning. Tim puts an arm around him and leans his head into his brother’s wet hair. “They weren’t people,” he murmurs. “Let’s get out of here.”

Melanie puts the van into gear and backs out of the car park, eager to be back inside a building. It’s very quiet for a while, until Martin says, “I’ve been thinking. In that video, Danny has… I don’t know, five or six minutes of footage underwater. But it was only a minute between when he dropped in and when we pulled him out. We started almost immediately.”

“I fucking hate that place,” says Tim. “Let’s never, ever go there again.”


	10. The Glass Scream

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Technically there is a murder in this one. And fire.

Tim refuses to let Danny come with them to Loch Glass. “You always do stupid shit!” he hisses.

“Am I the one who got a job doing stupid shit? No? Could that be you—”

This is the point where Melanie leaves to let them sort it out among themselves, because it’s obvious they’re about to start shouting at each other. Half an hour later Tim gets into the van and slams the door shut. Sasha,  the dedicated navigator for this leg of the trip, puts on some cheerful folk music, which Tim fumes through as Melanie pulls out of the car park. It’s not _that_ bad, really. Jon has the amazing ability to ignore anyone’s emotions at any time, so he starts talking to Basira enthusiastically about a solar eclipse that happened in 1715. That makes the car a generally more cheerful place, and eventually even Tim forgets that he’s angry and starts making stupid innuendos. The balance is restored.

After a couple hours Melanie parks and refuses to drive any more, at which point Tim takes over (he’s a surprisingly careful driver). It means she’s free to put on headphones and stare out the window at the bare forest flashing past, intercut with rolling heath as they head further north. She hasn’t been this way in years, and she’s mesmerized by the desolate loveliness of the winter landscape.

By the time they stop for a late lunch in Edinburgh, Jon still hasn’t shut up. Maybe in a couple weeks Melanie will find this endearing, but right now she sort of wants to murder him. “Can’t you read quietly?” she asks him, with the minimum waspishness she can manage (still about 50% of maximum waspishness).

“What is study without discussion?” Jon mutters. But he at least… _whispers_ to Basira after that.

Finally, when the car makes it to the end of the road outside Evanton, everyone is extremely ready to be outside despite how cold it is. It’s kind of lovely up here in the highlands, even when everything but the evergreens is dead. They’ve got real mountains, and walking through the trees without finding anything trying to kill them is slowly unwinding something inside Melanie.

They only make it about an hour into the forest before it starts to get dark, and there they pitch their tents. Camping in northern Scotland in February is, as Melanie predicted, miserable. And somehow there are still ticks.

At the end of the second day they’re well into the forest, and approaching the area where triangulation puts the ‘Loch Glass Scream.’ The plan is legitimately that they’re going to split into two groups and wander around recording their position on GPS until someone finds something ‘unusual.’ Melanie can’t help but think that Danny might have had some insight into how to find an unknown supernatural phenomenon in a forest. But he isn’t here, because he can’t really be stopped from running face-first into it, so they’ll have to make do.

The third day: nothing. They cover what looks like an encouragingly large amount of ground… until Tim zooms out on the GPS to show how much larger the search area is.

“Does anyone have any ideas about what _kinds_ of places would be more likely to be haunted?” Melanie asks, leaning on her hand as she glares at the map. “Streams? Clearings? High places? Low places?”

“High places feels right?” says Martin.

“Is it a scream of pain?” Basira asks. “In that case we’re looking for somewhere someone would get hurt. If it’s anger, though, or an animal scream, that’s different.” She reads over Jon’s shoulder when he pulls out the much-creased printout containing all the descriptions of the scream they could find. “It sounded like a man. Mmm… lasted about seven seconds… only one scream per year…”

“Do we think it’s linked to the wildfire that happened in 1877, given that it was first observed in 1878? I would expect most fires around here to be started by lightning.”

“Then I’ll be looking low,” Sasha declares. “It’s _super_ natural, not natural.”

And it’s Sasha’s group, the next day, that finds it. About an hour before sunset, as Melanie, Jon, and Basira are climbing another steep slope, the walkie-talkie crackles into life. “We found it!” says Sasha’s grainy voice. “At 50.5, 70.3, just off the stream. We’re not going to go in yet, at least until everyone is here, but Tim’s getting some incredible shots.”

“What is it?” Jon demands.

“Imagine the Seven Sisters, but on fire. Don’t worry, it’s contained. How far away are you?”

“About an hour.”

Basira leans in to say, “Are we sure we want to do this as it’s getting dark? We could camp a ways off and go in the morning.”

Melanie grabs the transceiver from him. “We’ll decide when we get there. Be there soon, okay? Maybe stay _away_ from the fire until we arrive.”

“Roger. See you soon.”

Jon sets the pace. He’s clearly pushing himself way too hard because he’s eager to get there; he always gives the impression that he’s never walked more than half a mile in the same day. Now, carrying among other things a heavy bag of tentpoles, he rushes onward, wheezing. Melanie isn’t enjoying herself either, but she’s not in such bad shape as him by the time they make it to the bend of one of the small streams that feeds Loch Misirich.

Sasha, Tim, and Martin are making an early dinner next to it. When Jon wants to go immediately to the fire, but Martin says, “It’ll still be there in twenty minutes, and you’re more likely to survive whatever it throws at you if you’ve eaten.”

Basira and Melanie sit gratefully—and Jon grudgingly—for a delicious meal of freeze-dried beef stroganoff. This does mean, though, that it’s starting to get properly dark by the time they actually reach the fire. It’s visible for a long way around through the forest, and they can _smell_ it too. When faced with the thing itself Melanie can only stop and stare.

There’s a circle of burning trees—probably pines, but it’s kind of hard to tell through all the _fire_ —maybe ten of them, with one more in the middle. Even though they’re close enough to touch the other trees around them, even though Melanie can feel the terrible heat and the smell of smoke is almost overwhelming, the other trees don’t catch fire. Sasha was right: it is _contained_. It lights up the forest around it with a grim hot light that casts tar-black wavering shadows across the ground like the rays of an inverted sun.

Melanie stoops to pick up a stick and edges forward to light it on one of the burning branches nearest. It lights perfectly fine, but as she draws it out she can clearly see the boundary where the flame is extinguished. “Are you getting this, Tim?”

“Do it once more and I can get a really good shot.”

Melanie does it again, but rather than looking at the stick her gaze is drawn inward to the burning grove. The repeating patterns of the flames are hypnotic, almost. Then halfway through drawing the stick out, it drops to burn on the ground inside the circle, because _something_ is walking by the tree in the center. She pulls the camera around to face it, and as she squints she can make out a long, low body with four legs. Its legs are much too short to be a deer, and it’s too large to be a badger or anything she recognizes. She has never seen an animal like this.

It waddles closer through the burning, unconsumed underbrush until suddenly Melanie realizes that it has a human face. There’s a sharp edge with the fur, as if it were wearing a mask. With its mouth open in a silent scream.

She can hear the others stumbling backward from it in fear, but Melanie doesn’t move. She says, “H-hello? Are you the spirit of this place?”

It screams.

It’s obvious how it can be heard for miles around. It’s ear-splittingly loud and seems to go on for far too long. And it sounds like nothing so much as a scream of abject terror.

“We’re not here to hurt you!” Martin cries. “We just wanted to see if you were okay! Since you, um, you keep… screaming…” He trails off, starit at the spirit, whose mask has changed into a blank non-expression. “Can you… can you talk? Tell us what’s wrong?”

The mouth of the mask is open now in an O shape, and a voice with a heavy Scottish accent comes out. “I’m sure it’s around here somewhere.”

A different voice: “It’s not.”

“What?”

“It never existed. But here, away from everyone, you can be tragically killed by a wild beast or a fall from a crag.”

“Are you—Alistair! You can’t—you can’t, you’re my brother!”

“By marriage only,” says Alistair’s voice viciously. There’s a heavy thud from the mask, and then quiet, unintelligible cursing, and the growing sound of crackling flames.

“Please,” says the other voice. “Help me.” Whatever causes him to scream is drowned out by the scream itself. Then it dies and there is nothing but fire.

“It’s not going to happen again,” says Martin. He crouches down and holds his hand out to the spirit. “Come here. Come out of the fire. He’s been dead a long time, and there’s nothing you can do to save him now, but you can save yourself.”

Hesitantly the spirit comes forward until it’s paused just before the boundary. Then  it begins to walk forward with some difficulty, as if it’s pushing through something thick. When its shoulders are through Martin wraps his arms around it and pulls, and it flies out to lie on him in a heap. Close to, it’s even bigger; it must be as long as Martin is tall. “Shh, shhh,” says Martin, stroking its neck. “Almost there. You don’t need a human face, now do you?” As he gets his fingers under the edges of the mask the spirit pulls back sharply in discomfort. But his grip is good enough that the mask comes away, taking a few clumps of fur with it.

Now what looks like an enormous weasel is crouched in front of him, trembling slightly. He reaches out to touch it again, but it bounds suddenly away around the boundary of the fire. He stands to take a few uncertain steps after it, then turns and shrugs at the rest of them.

Behind him a branch crashes down. And then another. The trees are beginning to burn themselves out at last.


	11. Passage Barred

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> violence in gay club; violence in forest

“These are good,” says Al. “And they’re originals. Local artist?”

“You could say that. That’s her in the photos with me.”

“Hmm. She’s pretty.” Al turns just enough that Melanie can see his raised eyebrows and the smile crinkling the edges of his eyes.

“Yes. She is. Her name’s Beatrice.”

“Any chance I could get one of hers? I mean, does she take commissions?”

“Al, Mel’s fucking with you. Beatrice is a ghost. I thought you’d seen that episode.”

“She might take commissions, though. I’ll ask next time I visit.”

Al shakes his head, still smiling under his beard. “Maybe I’ll come with you. I’m sure she’s always excited to see new faces. And Sam can’t complain I’m putting myself in trouble.”

“And that’s all you care about, you nuisance.” Sam hooks his arm around Al’s neck and kisses him, mock-angrily, on the side of his head.

“I did want to rub it in your face, a little bit,” says Melanie as she goes to the kitchen. “That there are spirits who aren’t dangerous. Plenty of them. Some that even need help.”

“I never said there weren’t.” Sam accepts a beer and raises it toward her in a little half-toast. “I’ve even met a few myself. You ever been to the Bear’s Head? Gay club in Hammersmith?”

“Was Nigel really a ghost?” asks Al with interest. “I guess I’m glad I didn’t try to dance with him, then. He would’ve been so embarrassed.”

“Hush and let me tell it! And he was solid enough. Spirits often are. So: I heard from some of the people there, afterward, that he’d been a regular for years and years. Back then people thought of him as a bit of a bouncer, for all that he didn’t officially work there. He’d break up fights, throw out skinheads. Anyone people wanted gone but were too scared to fight, he’d take care of them, or he’d get other people pumped up to help. Now I know he was something like the spirit of the bar. He was what the young gay men were wishing for, someone who was never afraid to defend them.

“Now, about three years ago a group of bad ones started hanging around in the Bear’s Head. They tried to seem like the right sort, at least until they were too settled in for people to really be united about wanting them out. It took a while for them to bring in more and more of _their_ sort, until half the regular patrons got way too drunk, or showed up high—they’d start fights, harrass the younger men. And Nigel started to pick that up from them. Nobody understood what was happening, of course. They didn’t know he was tuned into the bar as a whole, he reflected the values of the community and didn’t have any morals of his own. So he went bad, and when someone tried to call him on it he’d rough them up. Pretty quick people stopped calling him on it, and more people started to leave who’d been going to the Bear’s Head for years.”

“We didn’t go that often,” Al adds. “Clubs aren’t really our scene. But we’d had some friends who did, and who we hadn’t heard from in a while, so we went to see them in the place where we’d always find them. It was a real shock to find all those—calling them hoodlums is an insult to good honest hoodlums. Sam pushed right through them and said Nigel, why haven’t you thrown these idiots out? What’ve you let happen to your bar? And of course, Nigel decked him.”

“You ever seen Al’s defensive instincts kick in, Mel?”

She laughs. “Oh, I can imagine.”

“Right, if you were wondering about the new broken nose…”

“You said it looked handsome.”

“It looks unbearably handsome, but you have to admit it’s new since Mel’s last seen you. Anyway, a bunch of Nigel’s new _friends_ stood around cheering while he beat the shit out of us, but it _was_ two on one, and Al finally managed to get him in a headlock so I could talk to him. I don’t remember exactly what he said, I was a little high on adrenaline, but it was along these lines: he said he went with the flow. He was who people needed him to be. And right then, he said, they needed him to kick us out. So he did.

“I’d started to have a suspicion, so after we’d had a day or two to lick our wounds I brought over some ghost hunting equipment. Early, before the bar was properly open, but the owner knows me so he let me in. I played hot and cold for a while with the EMF reader, wandering around the empty club, until I came to the corner of the bar where Nigel usually sat. It was going crazy at that point, must have been fifty, sixty milliGauss? I sat down on the next stool and I said, Nigel, you’re there, aren’t you? And suddenly, he was. He looked at me steadily, asked what I wanted. I said I just wanted to know who he was. See, when it was just the two of us he didn’t have any interest keeping it a secret. Yeah, he said, he was the spirit of the bar, and he got rid of people the bar didn’t like. I asked, who does the bar like right now? And he said, you, you’re the only one in here.

“So I decided to talk to the owner about hiring a proper bouncer. They’d gotten used to not having a bouncer in the early days when they couldn’t afford to pay one, and Nigel was there anyway. I told them those young idiots were so far out of line they couldn’t even see the line any more, and they all needed to be on the blacklist. He was pretty relieved, honestly, that someone was making him act. He hated them as much as anyone, but he was scared they’d leave and he’d have no patrons left. I told him I’d help spread the word and organize a big welcome-back party if he just got rid of them. It was so simple, in the end, after all the trouble they’d made. They weren’t so tough staring down a great big seven-foot bear.”

“The welcome-back party was lovely,” says Al. “And Nigel was a perfect sweetheart. No sign he’d ever fallen in with those idiots. I wanted to dance with him, a bit, but Sam monopolized me so I didn’t have a chance.”

Sam huffs out a silent, satisfied laugh. “He came and thanked me personally for sorting him out. He didn’t like who he’d been any more than I did, when he was with them. I know they need our help, Mel. I just think you need to have all the facts before you go around trying to help them.”

She sighs, frustrated. “I know. It would be the smart thing to do. But scheduling, Sam. You have no idea—you absolutely have an idea of how hectic it is. But listen: it’s fucking terrible. I don’t feel I have time to do what’s safest. I can’t lose this show.”

“ _Make_ time, Mel.  I have no patience for your deathwish, or your disregard for your crew’s safety, or whatever this is. You might think you’re giving them the choice by asking them do they want to be here, but there are all kinds of subtle pressure you can exert without knowing it. So keep them safe.”

 

Which is easier said than done.

 

“We’re here at the Royal Observatory,” says Basira. “Figured historically significant places might have more spirit energy or something?” She glances past the camera and her face crinkles into a smile. “And that’s the whole reason we’re here. Hypothesis testing.”

She turns her back on the camera and walks away, waving a hand as if to say _follow me_. “We have a couple theories on what exactly would create a spirit here. There might be something interesting going on with time given, well, _everything_ in the Greenwich Gallery. And then there’s… the history of the post of Astronomer Royal. Am I forgetting anything?”

“Personally I think anywhere with a sense of deep history could result in a spirit,” says Jon from behind the camera. “Remember the dolmen?”

“I still don’t think that was a spirit.”

“It registered on the EMF meter.”

“Yeah, but so do underground power lines.”

Jon makes a little _hmph_ noise and they walk in silence until Basira says, “Oh, hide the camera, I don’t know if we’re allowed to film inside.”

The footage cuts here to a low shot of the inside of a building that will later be identifiable as Flamsteed House. A tour guide can be heard distantly saying, “—quarters of the Maskelynes, who lived here from 1765 to 1811…”

The guide’s words become indistinct when Basira whispers over them, “Jon, did you see that?”

“What?”

“A… shadow man. Look, there he is, in the doorway.”

The camera turns and then steadies enough to see absolutely nothing in the doorway. “What should we do?” Jon whispers. “Follow him?”

“Wait ‘til the tour goes to the next room…”

There’s a long moment of tense waiting, during which the guide can be heard saying “…1785, who got the best education a little girl could ever hope for. In the next room we’ll see some of her things…”

“Okay, let’s go.”

Some of the next footage has been cut, possibly because Jon is incapable of holding a camera steady for any length of time while moving; the next shot is of Basira walking in front of him out of a door and onto the wide lawn of Greenwich Park. “Knew it,” she says over her shoulder. “I can take the camera if it’ll make it easier to run.”

Basira is a little steadier, so it’s intermittently possible to make out the forest on the edge of the field growing closer. All that can be heard is her labored breathing and the camera hitting against her shoulder, until she comes to a stop at the edge of the forest. She turns to see Jon jogging up behind her, wheezing. “I got a look at his face,” she says excitedly. “Jon, that’s _Edmund Halley_.”

“The spirit of petty treachery in the sciences, you think?” Jon gasps, bending over his knees. Then, “You can recognize people just by looking at their _faces_?”

“We don’t have time to argue about this,” says Basira. “Come on, he went straight into the woods.”

“Wait,” says Jon faintly behind her. “Basira, do you think this might be dangerous?”

“Honestly, what is he going to do? Steal the camera and give it to Isaac Newton?”

Jon laughs breathlessly, and then the shot cuts again to a steady view of a clearing in the forest. It’s dim under the trees, and the camera is focused above what looks at first like a pit or an area of perfectly black ground. “Are you really Halley?” Basira asks (Jon can be heard trying to catch his breath in the background). She pauses and then says, “Then why do you look like him?”

“Basira,” says Jon urgently. “He’s not alone. Was this a _trap_ , Halley? Or—or whatever you are?”

There’s a yell and the camera drops to the ground and falls near the edge of the patch of blackness; close to, it isn’t any easier to identify. At least until Basira falls at the edge too, clawing at her throat, and her headscarf touches the surface. A dark liquid soaks into the fabric, spreading up around her head. She grunts with effort and seems to roll something off of her. She rolls offscreen and all that’s left is audio of bodies striking the ground—striking other bodies?—and sounds of pain.

That’s all the usable footage there is, for a very generous value of ‘usable.’ It does _sort of_ explain why Basira and Jon turned up looking like they’d been in a fight: Basira with a bloody nose and a bruise high on one cheek, speaking in a raspy strangled voice and wearing Jon’s jacket as a scarf, her own mysteriously missing; Jon with a spectacularly swollen black eye and a limp, holding one arm tight to his side.

Melanie is irritated with them because they’re living proof that having more facts is not in fact always safer. “So…” she says, pushing her laptop away across the table. “Did you find out anything _useful_? Or was it just a waste of time that got you hurt for no reason?”

“There are some ghosts the camera can’t see,” offers Jon weakly.

“It’s possible Edmund Halley was a murderer,” Basira croaks.

“Please tell me that you at least learned not to _follow spirits anywhere_.”

They both look as if this particular lesson never even occurred to them. Melanie puts her head in her hands.


	12. The Fearful City

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bombs fall on the city.

“London is filled with architectural ghosts, built up out of its own corpse over and over. Walls from the era of Roman occupation were built around rather than removed, like tissue closing around a foreign object. The roads around the Tate Britain still follow the perimeter ditch of Millbank Prison like the ghosts of sentries. The Great Fire left its mark as streets were widened over the rubble of homes whose charred skeletons had been demolished to make way. Much of the city was destroyed during the Blitz, and you can still see the scars if you know where to look. Newer buildings in old districts, where something historic was bombed to rubble. Detritus left in odd corners of train tunnels where they were used as air raid shelters. And the Barbican art gallery, which takes its distinctive shape from the bomb crater where it was built.”

“We’re here to test a theory,” Melanie continues, giving Jon an approving nod. She cannot _believe_ he ad-libbed that, even if she’s pretty sure he stole most of his research from one of those old Gertrude Robinson history videos. “Basira thinks, and I agree, that it might not just be the feelings of people that create ghosts. We think that the city itself, the land and the buildings, might have memories too.”

“Which is not to say,” continues Jon, “that there is no interference from people’s feelings about the structure itself. It’s more or less an unsettling warren of inexplicable architectural choices, narrow non-passages and dead ends. Anyone with good sense _should_ find the building uncanny.”

“Jon got lost in the museum,” Melanie adds, for the viewers’ benefit. He puffs out a little irritated puff of air through his nose and strides forward toward the middle of the Barbican’s courtyard.

Basira takes her place walking in front of the camera. “So, we’re not exactly sure how to contact the spirit of a place that isn’t widely thought to be haunted. Most of the time spirits contact _us_. That means we’re going to have to… play around a little. This could get silly.”

Melanie can’t help but laugh at her deadpan delivery as they arrive in the center of the courtyard. The walls of the art gallery and its adjacent building rise all around them, hemming  them in and blocking out most of the sky. Melanie is caught between the fact that coming here at twilight was an excellent aesthetic choice and that it was a terrible choice for her own nerves. The dark trees standing aroud them in irregular concentric circles, as if they’re watching, waiting—those don’t help either. They make her think of Blackwood’s willows.

“Do we think the center of the circle is a kind of focus?” Sasha whispers as she sweeps the camera around to look up at the surrounding walls.

“Maybe,” says Jon. “Ground zero of ground zero?”

“If there’s a spirit of the war here,” says Melanie, “come say hi! If you’re a spirit of WWII or a spirit of the Blitz…”

And then her vision wavers and she blinks. She sees an odd double image, as if one eye is looking at the neatly paved courtyard surrounded by watchful trees but the other is looking at a crater so fresh the rubble is still burning inside it. G-d only knows what the camera is getting. “Hey, are you all seeing what I’m seeing?”

“I think so,” says Basira. “We’re in the right place… so where’s the spirit?”

“What if this _is_ the spirit?” says Jon urgently. “Other spirits have been solid and real. I don’t want to be in the middle of one that thinks it’s in the Blitz.”

“Oh, fuck,” mutters Martin. He sounds like he’s about to cry. And with good reason; he can’t _talk down_ a crater. He’s the first to break and run for the narrow gap between the two buildings, and the rest follow soon after.

Unfortunately, what’s beyond the gap isn’t what they hoped. Martin skids to a stop in horror and Melanie nearly runs into him. They’re looking out at what is clearly modern London, the familiar silhouettes of buildings and adverts for fast food restaurants and mobile apps barely visible in the twilight. But all the lights are out, every single one. In the horrified silence a noise makes itself known, insidiously, as if it was already there but it snuck into their ears: the whooshing roar of a fighter jet. Jon, Sasha, and Martin are looking wildly around for where the plane actually _is_ , but something is nagging at Melanie.

“What about the siren?” says Basira. “There ought to be a siren.”

Melanie glances behind them, where the only indication of where the Barbican Centre should be is the crater its foundation was poured into. She can feel the heat pouring off it, and the column of smoke and dust that obscures the sky behind them. “Make a run for the tube station? Because I don’t fancy being out here when the next bomb drops. They might not still be on WWII-level technology.”

They sprint for Barbican Station, faster than they’ve ever run from anything. Over broken concrete where a wall used to separate it from the adjacent courtyard, around the ruins of the Shakespeare Tower, clattering down the stairs with their phones out as lights and flinching at distant explosions in other parts of the city. Melanie can dimly see that the Beech Street tunnel has collapsed completely; a few cars can be seen parked hastily underneath and then crushed. But there, across the street, is the entrance to the tube station.

They pile in and sprint down the stairs, nearly tumbling out at the bottom. Melanie’s expecting to see people hiding down here, emergency lights maybe, or people with torches. But it’s even more perfectly dark in the tunnels than it is up on the surface.

The ceiling shakes with the rumble of another bomb falling somewhere overhead. In the dark they all look uneasily around; Martin calls out, “Hello? Is anyone here?”

They creep along the platform, shining the light from their phones everywhere, but there’s nothing. Since the bombs are still falling outside, they decide to walk along the tunnels. Surely all the people must be hiding _somewhere_. But they walk for hours, with no change except that the tunnels are becoming more and more… fungal. Quite a few times they’re startled by passing rats, and once Martin swears he saw a fox. Eventually they start coming across collapsed sections of tunnel, having to double back when every way forward is blocked. By this point they’re all freaking out. Basira’s jaw is clenched so tight Melanie can see the muscles tense and shaking in the dim light of her torch. Martin has stopped even trying to cheer anyone up, and Jon mutters ceaselessly under his breath as if to drown out the noises of scuttling and dripping water. It’s been… Melanie doesn’t know how long it’s been since they actually passed a platform.

“Camera’s running out of battery,” says Sasha despondently. “I mean, I’ve got a spare. But I’m not sure what’s the point. I’m tired of holding it up.”

“I can’t believe you’ve actually _been_ holding it up this entire time,” Martin mutters. “You make Tim look casual about filming.”

Sasha can’t quite manage a laugh, but she does sigh as if she’s making an attempt. “At what point do we accept we’re going to die down here and just… get to rest?”

“You rest, then,” says Basira, stopping in her tracks. She looks over her shoulder at Sasha. “I’ll go ahead and see if I can find a platform. I’ll stick to the left-hand wall so I can’t lose my way.”

“You don’t know space works consistently here,” Jon snaps. “Either we go all together or we don’t go anywhere.”

“I’ve got to do _something_!”

“Shut up,” Melanie snaps, and, surprised, they both do. “Jon’s right. I’m not letting anyone get lost. If you want to be useful, try and figure out from his map where we are.” She sits down and shucks off her backpack, and with a relieved sigh Sasha follows suit.

Basira, scowling, sits as well to look over the map Jon has been drawing as they go, nearly from the beginning. The connection from Barbican Station is a little tenuous, but they seem to come to an agreement that they’re at least somewhere on or within the Circle Line. Which theoretically should mean there are loads of stations _somewhere_. Maybe they’ve all collapsed.

After twenty minutes and some protein bars they get up and keep walking, in the direction Basira theorizes is toward Green Park.

They’ve been walking again for less than ten minutes when the tunnel starts to rumble. Melanie looks up. They haven’t heard bombs in some time, so why should they start up again now? But it isn’t bombs, she realizes, when a light rounds the corner. It’s a train.

They dart toward a side passage and take shelter as the train roars deafeningly past, and look at each other with wild eyes. If a train is going that direction, there has to be a platform there. And they run after it in the clammy tunnel until they find it leaving a station. Jon begins to laugh aloud as they draw close enough to see that they’ve found their way to the lower platform at Holborn. His laughter is infectious, and soon all of them are scrambling up onto the platform, laughing in absolute relief as commuters stare. Melanie grins at a man who’s looking at her like she has two heads and says, “Good evening, and what a _lovely_ time to be taking the train.”

He turns away, muttering something she can’t hear.

When they emerge onto the cool street it seems to be late afternoon. Melanie checks her phone in puzzlement—says it’s 4:17 PM. Then it buzzes with four new text messages and two missed calls, all from Tim.

_8:22 PM | how’s the shoot going?_

_9:48 PM | no, seriously, what’s up? Sasha won’t answer my texts either_

_10:01 PM | Melanie pick up your damn phone, I can’t reach anyone. if you got killed by a ghost I’m going to REkill you_

_9:15 AM |couldn’t find anyone at the barbican who remembered seeing you. TEXT ME IF YOU GET THIS_

She hastily replies: _We made it out Tim! You can stop freaking out, we’re coming back to the office. Will tell you everything when we get there._

She swipes away the missed call notifications, and then stands there looking at the last notification, which is from an unknown five-digit number.

_EMERGENCY NOTIFICATION: Bombers incoming, expected at 7:04 PM.  Proceed immediately to your nearest shelter. For more information: greaterlondonsheltermap.gov.uk_

When she taps the link her phone tells her the site can’t be reached. It doesn’t exist, and yet here she has a message telling her to go there to find her nearest shelter. When she shows it around, it turns out everyone else got it too.

Nobody knows what to make of that, and nobody wants to be underground, so they split the fare for a cab to the office. Tim jumps up anxiously the moment the door opens and stands there with his fists clenched, looking at them as if he can’t quite think what to say. Slowly he sits back down and crosses his arms over the table, pushing away his laptop where it seems he’s been editing.

“Tell me what happened.”

“We can show you,” says Sasha, putting the camera down in front of him. “It will involve some fast-forwarding, though, because we spent, I don’t know, five hours wandering around in the dark?”

“You went to an _art museum_.”

She sits sideways in the chair next to him and leans her head back against his shoulder. “Missed you too. Just watch it, all right? You’ll see.”

He sighs and runs a hand through his hair. “Well, I’m glad you’re not dead. You want to order pizza?”

“ _Very_ much, I haven’t eaten anything but protein bars for most of a day. I’m starving.”


	13. Shallow Graves

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Death; unreality

They’re still arguing about what the hell happened at the Barbican Centre, even after they’ve finished watching the footage on Tim’s computer. It’s not that the video itself is confusing; it shows exactly what they all thought they saw, the present-day city of London being bombed out by fighter jets. It’s just that none of them can understand how a spirit could fake an entire city.

“Spirits can distort our perception,” Jon insists. “It’s clear we were simply in the real-world analogue of every place we thought we experienced.”

“Then how the hell did we not get run over by a train?” says Melanie. “We were down there for hours!”

“We have no way of knowing that—”

“Come on! Then where did the six hours of camera footage come from? Spirits can distort the _actual flow of time_ , not just our perception!”

Jon is however not the type of person to _ever_ back down, nor does he have any common sense, so it’s Melanie who has to storm dramatically out of the warehouse to cool her head off. _He_ is perfectly willing to escalate a shouting match forever. Ugh! Nobody else even wanted to touch the argument, though they must have opinions. They’re stuck between a rock and a hard place: either Melanie or Jon is going to end up yelling at them. Or, realistically, both.

She comes back much calmer and with a coffee to announce to everyone (still bickering, but more quietly), “Since we have no proof either way, for now we should just present all our theories and let the audience decide what they think. Each theory can have a segment.”

“And we should try to think what data to collect to prove one hypothesis or another,” adds Sasha.

“Yes. Good thinking.”

Jon seems happy enough with this, but Tim mutters from under his arm, “You’re really going to go back in after almost getting bombed. Oh fucking kay.”

Everyone ignores him, because this is by now a daily occurrence.

“Anyway, I’ve had a call from an old friend. Mr. Meir is going to be our contact on this one. Says he’s been hearing about child spirits wandering around a particular construction site scaring developers. It’s Croydon so nobody was looking forward to more gentrification anyway, but they’re a bit worried the spirits are dangerous to them as well.”

“They actually believe in them?” asks Sasha in surprise.

“A lot of them do. So I want you all to find anything you can on urban legends about the ghosts of kids or historical murders or anything. One search term I’ve got for you is ‘Dollsfield.’ Dunno why it’s called that, but that’s the name of the lot where the developers are trying to build.”

 

On Thursday Melanie, Martin, and Sasha make their way to Mr. Meir’s shabby, comfy little house on Church Road, and sit trying to get him to stop pushing food on them long enough to give an interview on film.

“You can still put away food just as good as when you were _this_ high,” he says cheerfullly. “Some days I don’t know if you’d have eaten at all if you didn’t come over here! Not that I blame your father, may his memory be a blessing. He did the best he could and I’ll be damned if you didn’t turn out right. Look at you, eh, swooping in to save us all from ghosts?”

Melanie’s ears burn and she mutters, “Thanks, Mr. Meir. I, um, do appreciate you saying such kind things, but, uh…” She can _hear_ Sasha stifling laughter next to her. “Shut up, would you? Maybe Martin should do the interview so we don’t have to edit out your giggling.”

Sasha bursts out laughing at this; Martin glances at her with an expression like he’s trying not to laugh himself and sits up straighter, into his interviewer posture. “Right, er, okay. Mr. Meir… Sasha, stop it.” Mr. Meir leans back in his armchair in great satisfaction at having mortified Melanie so thoroughly. “Mr. Meir, can you tell us the story of your neighborhood? And in particular, Dollsfield?”

“Well, as I’m sure you know, wherever there’s cheap property you’lll find developers circling around it like sharks who smelled blood in the water. So: Dollsfield is a cheap property where there isn’t anything right now. It’s cheap because nobody wants it.”

“Can you tell us why it’s called that?” Martin asks. “We found explanations online, but we’d rather hear it in your words.”

“Well, well, well. We didn’t even find out _why_ it was called that until they started digging.” Mr. Meir leans forward with a twinkle in his eye. Like all old men he’s always looking for an opportunity to tell a story, and he’s good at it. “That lot’s been empty as long as anyone can remember, and it’s always been Dollsfield. My own dear mother said it was a creepy place even when she was a child, and nothing was ever built there. So for years it was just weeds and gravel. Then in, eh, what was it, 2012 maybe, the first developers come out to survey it. See what the soil is like, how it’ll be if they try to dig a foundation, I don’t know, I’m not a builder. And what do you think they turned up? Dolls!

“You might be thinking, this place was abandoned for decades, they were all Victorian dolls or something. But they found plentie of Barbies in there too. Dolls of every kind, every material, every size. Porcelain dolls with shattered faces. Worry dolls with unravelling string. Sackcloth dolls with all the features rotted away. They took a while to come back after that! They must have figured Dollsfield was full of ghosts. We knew better, though, didn’t we? Well. Some of us. I was quite sure someone’d just buried them. And kept on burying them for another hundred years. I thought one of the families had taken it upon themselves to teach their kids to do this. But nobody would admit it!

“Now, last autumn the developers finally came back and started digging again. But strange things were happening to their construction equipment. They’d stall and the workmen would find water in the engines where it shouldn’t have been. Pieces would come unbolted and need to be fixed. It wasn’t such an inconvenience for them at first, smallish stuff. But as they worked for longer, through the winter, it was worse things. The stuck parts would have doll heads in them, and the workers swore they saw kids wandering around the lot at night, or early, early in the morning. This is all second- or third-hand, of course, from people who heard them gossipping. But it’s certainly very interesting.”

“Has anyone living here seen the child spirits?” Martin asks.

“They certainly say they have. Nobody can quite agree on what they look like, though. Some of my neighbors are worried about the ghosts hurting their kids or, I don’t know, stalling their cars. I think they might feel better if you could do something about it. Give the ghosts a stern talking-to, maybe?” Mr. Meir laughs his wheezy laugh. It’s so familiar, listening to him laugh at his own story, that Melanie feels powerfully like it’s 1998 again and she’s sitting on a stool in his kitchen trying to apply her own sticking plasters while he makes soup. Her fingers drift up to her right eyebrow where she needed stitches when she was twelve, and she half expects to feel them still fresh. But it’s 2016, and only the scar is there.

“We’ll do what we can,” she says a little numbly. “Thank you, Mr. Meir.”

“You don’t think I’m not coming?”

“You can’t!” says Martin, jumping to his feet. “It’s _really_ dangerous! I mean, sir, we’ve almost died many times. I don’t want it on my conscience that I let someone get hurt who doesn’t understand the risks.”

“Tie me up, then,” says Mr. Meir serenely. He rises and slowly starts about gathering his coat and his outside glasses and his keys. “What’s that? You forgot to bring rope? What a pity. Let’s be off. Evening is a good time to see them. I think they like the, what is it, the boundaries between day and night.”

Dollsfield isn’t far from Mr. Meir’s house at all. There’s no work being done there currently, so the machines sit silent, nothing more than hulking angular yellow shapes in a half-dug-up field of weeds. It doesn’t take long to find the first dolls; they’re just lying in piles of dirt near the excavators. Sasha goes over to get closeups while Melanie and Martin wander around the periphery of the dig site. Mr. Meir, thank goodness, sticks close to Melanie as if he knows she won’t be able to focus unless she can keep an eye on him.

When they come back together Melanie centers herself and uses the tried-and-true method for contacting spirits: “Oi! Any spirits here? We’re friends. Of the neighborhood, I mean. Like to talk to you if you’re willing.”

A gentle wind ruffles the grasses in the field. There’s a weird moment where Melanie feels like a sound just on the edge of hearing is panning all around them, and then the spirit speaks.

“What are you.”

It’s a chorus of children’s voices, coming from lower down than Melanie would expect. Some, behind her, are clear. Others are so muffled she can barely pick them out. As if they’re… buried.

“Friends,” says Martin, “like Melanie said. Hi, I’m Martin. You’re the spirit of, um, Dollsfield?”

“This place doesn’t want you. It doesn’t want anyone.”

“No, um, that’s good, just, you know, checking. We heard you were trying to make the construction company leave and we appreciate it. Just want to make sure you won’t, er, _hurt_ anyone who comes through here?” There’s  silence from the spirit, during which Martin begins to wring his hands nervously. “I mean, the people who live here, they’re just your neighbors. O-obviously it’s not very nice of them to just walk through your, er, house, but you also don’t hurt people just for trespassing, right?”

“Does Martin think this place can hurt it? Here is only a field.”

“Well…” Martin laughs nervously. “You certainly did a number on the construction equipment.”

“Martin and friends can go,” says the disinterested chorus. “Other friends can go. Leave.”

“Thank you,” says Martin, sagging visibly in relief. “We will. We’ll go.”

Mr. Meir doesn’t hurry, but at the edge of the field he turns back and raises his hand in farewell. “Thank you for your consideration, Dollsfield,” he calls. “I won’t come in, but I’ll stop by to say hello from time to time, if you don’t mind too very much. Goodbye.”

Mr. Meir is altogether _too_ cheerful, in Melanie’s opinion, on the way back to his house. He waves hello to a few kids—does he still take in every stray he can get his hands on?—and a few people who are coming home from work. “Evening, Mr. Hilton. Evening, Mrs. Leyanda.”

“Evening, Rubin. You found someone else to feed?”

“Come over and find out!”

Melanie stops in her tracks and looks back. Mrs. Leyanda is laughing on her front step with two armfuls of shopping. Her silhouette is so familiar from every time Melanie visited her as a child, her wide shoulders and her towering head wrap. But seeing her with the porch light shining down on her, Melanie shivers. Her eyes are shadowed and the apples of her round cheeks stand out golden in the light. Like most of the neighborhood—including Mr. Meir—Melanie was invited to Mrs. Leyanda’s funeral when she was sixteen, and before that day she’d never heard any music like the funeral songs the Leyandas sang. It was also the first time she ever got drunk, along with their oldest son, Daniel.

“Melanie?” asks Sasha’s voice from ahead, and she shakes herself and looks around. “Is something wrong?”

“I…” Melanie looks back again, but Mrs. Leyanda has gone inside. “I… no. Nothing’s wrong. It’s just been a bit of a night.”

She follows Mr. Meir back into his house for the dinner he insists on making them, and does not reply when Hillary Farrier calls out to her from across the street.

Hillary died in a car crash in 2014, and Melanie doesn’t think it’s a good idea to speak to her on a night like tonight.


	14. Hola Weg

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From the Anglo Saxon, 'sunken road.'

No-one is there to receive them when they park at the front of the house, so they peer over the fence at the pasture until Sasha identifies a human figure away near the back. “Hello?” she calls. “We’re the—oh, they can’t hear me.” The figure puts down the sheep it was holding and jogs toward them across the field. On reaching the fence, the figure becomes a small, compact woman with sleepy eyes and muscles like steel cable. Melanie is a little mesmerized by her corded forearms. But she shakes herself and says, “You’re one of the Tonners?”

“I am. Are you the ghost people, then?”

“Yes. I’m Melanie King. This is Sasha, Jon, Basira, and Martin.”

“Pleasure.” She stretches out her hand and starts shaking each of theirs in turn. Her grip is like a vice. “I’m Daisy. You’ll meet Mary and Thomas later. And… Jack.” Melanie raises her eyebrows, but Daisy doesn’t volunteer any information on why Jack deserves such a significant pause. She just unlatches the fence and holds it open for them. “I’ve got to finish up a few things, if you’ll be patient. Er, you’re not filming me right now, are you?”

“Oh!” says Sasha. “I can stop. This probably isn’t going to make it into the final cut anyway. Do you… not want to be filmed at all?”

“It’s fine,” says Daisy nervously. “I just… I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I don’t have a… script?”

“This show’s not scripted. Just act natural, you’ll be fine.”

Daisy, apparently embarrassed, stumps off through the muddy field toward the sheep again. Sasha turns her camera on Jon, who’s trying to avoid getting any mud on his shoes and failing miserably.

When they spend too long standing around useless, Daisy’s sister Mary takes pity on them and puts them to work repairing a fence that got damaged in the recent heavy rainfall. It makes good PR and it’s not heavy lifting, so everyone is happy enough to do it. When the light starts to fade out of the cloudy sky the younger brother Thomas, who might be about seventeen, comes to call them inside. Personally Melanie is hoping for dinner, but Thomas points them upstairs.

At the end of the hall he knocks on one of the doors and a man’s voice comes from inside: “Yes?”

“Remember we said some people might be coming to see you? They’re here.” He turns to the crew and says, “Maybe not all of you at once, though. He’s a bit of a nervous type.”

Melanie, Martin, and Sasha enter the room, which looks like it was once the master bedroom. Like the rest of the house, the walls are stone, and a young man is sitting at a sturdy old desk by the window. He seems to be writing a letter, not looking at them.

“Do you mind if we film this?” asks Sasha. “We make a TV show.”

He turns. He looks exhausted. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about, but I don’t much care either. Do what you like as long as you can help me get home.”

“Where’s your home?” asks Martin, sitting down on the edge of the bed across from ‘Jack.’

He sighs heavily. “Just across the way there. But they don’t recognize me. It’s not my real home, it’s some fairy trick. As if they made a changeling of the whole world and I’m the only real thing in it. I don’t know if I believe you’re real either. I suppose it’s my punishment.”

“For what?”

“Draft dodging.”

Something goes _click_ in Melanie’s head, and Martin seems to catch it as well. “What year was it the last time you checked?” he asks.

“They tell me the year is 2016, which I don’t believe for a second. It _should_ be 1915.”

“Can you tell us what happened? How did you come here, to this time?”

“I had just been drafted, so at sunset three days ago I crept into the hollowway where I thought no-one would find me. They haven’t been used as roads for decades, as I hear it. I thought to travel north to the mountains…” He bows his head, and his shoulders tremble. “But when I climbed out to look for water I was nowhere in Wales. Nowhere in the British Isles at all, I shouldn’t think. Every color was too bright, so much that it hurt my eyes. Instead of rustling, the trees… sang. Quietly, and in a language I’ve never heard before or since, nor wish to. They sang with human voices. I’m not a superstitious man but what the hell could it be except Fairyland? I dove back into the hollowway like the Devil himself was after me—aye, and maybe he was. At that moment I wanted nothing but to see my family again, draft be damned. I needed to see that they were _real_. I wasn’t thinking straight. I _cannot_ go to war.”

“Good news for you there,” says Martin, with an attempt at an encouraging smile. “No more draft in 2016.”

“G-d!” Jack wails. “Am I to believe that I have been in Fairyland for a hundred years? Am I to believe there’s no way back?”

“I’m sure you’ve heard the songs,” says Melanie. “Traditionally there’s nothing you can do about it. _But_. Our job is to test traditions and understand where they come from.”

“We’re _not_ going in there,” says Basira from the hall. “I can _deal_ with almost getting drowned by a ghost. I cannot deal with getting slingshotted a hundred years into the future.”

“Then you can hold the rope,” Melanie calls over her shoulder.

Is Melanie a hypocrite? Yes, but she’s also the captain of this ship, and if anyone’s going down with it she is. Not that she _wants_ to, but getting to see the year 2100 isn’t the worst punishment for hubris. She has a lot of confidence in her own adaptability. And if she’ll admit it? She’s not sure whether she believes this story anyway.

Jack shows them to the hollowway and then peers down into it while Basira personally ties the rope around Melanie’s wrist. Then, gripping the trunk of a small tree for balance, he slides down into it. Melanie follows.

“I thought you didn’t want to go back.”

He’s standing at the bottom staring up at the vaulted roof of new greenery and a couple early flowers. “I don’t want to go back,” he says softly, in the voice of one standing in a cathedral. “What waits for me? The war? That awful Fairyland? The blind future two hundred years on? Nothing good. Nothing good at all.” Nevertheless he takes a  few steps forward, and she has to lunge after him to catch him by the shoulder. He shakes her off, shrinking away as if he doesn’t want to be touched.

“Then climb back up while you still can,” she tells him. “You’ll find somewhere. Go back. You shouldn’t be down here.”

“You shouldn’t be down here either,” he says. He starts forward again. “You still have everything I have lost. You don’t want to lose it for yourself, do you?”

So she walks by his side, hoping he’ll wear this fancy out, until suddenly he looks behind them as if he’s heard something. Melanie turns to follow his gaze, and she hears it too: the shuffling of feet. A procession is coming up behind them, dressed in faded foggy black, their faces turned down and strangely blurred. Four of them carry a coffin on their shoulders.

“A corpse road,” mutters Jack. Melanie backs up toward the root-tangled side of the hollowway, but he puts a hand on her shoulder to stop her. “You must walk at least three steps with a funeral.”

“Or… or what happens?”

“You must.”

She shivers in the twilight mist of the sunken road, waiting for the procession. As Jack stands to her right and behind her, she begins to feel like he’s more a ghost than a living man. At last the procession approaches. The people with blurred faces don’t seem to notice them, but Melanie and Jack fall into step with them. Melanie stops after three paces when the rope pulls tight around her wrist, but he doesn’t. “Jack! Wait!”

He doesn’t wait, and she’s already missed her window to grab him. His head is bowed like the other members of the funeral “Jack!”

As she watches his back retreating around the bend in the path, she thinks that his clothes are fading to the same foggy black as theirs, too. She shudders and backs away and the rope slackens behind her. “Jack,” she says one more time, but she’s not sure any more that he can even hear her. And then he’s out of sight, and the shuffle of feet dies away.

Alone now in the hollowway, a deep stillness seems to settle over everything. The trees still sough in the breeze, and there’s birdsong, but it _feels_ like silence. A waiting, listening silence, in the round leafy tunnel with no shard of sky showing.

A distant creaking or rumbling noise ahead in the hollowway that makes her think of carts with wooden wheels. Voices that she can’t make out, but whose accent surely isn’t Welsh.

“I hope you’re getting this,” she says to the camera. Her voice is quiet and flat and makes no impression on the world. “Someone’s driving a cart up ahead. I think it’s getting further, not closer. Dammit, this place is messing with my head.”

She turns back and starts gathering up the rope in front of her with her free hand. She feels a sudden urgent need to get home and make sure her crew is still there. It’s stupid to doubt that they are; Basira is holding the end of the rope. Melanie can still pull it taut, after all, so someone _must_ be holding the end.

She climbs out with some difficulty where the rope goes up over the edge, getting her hands and knees covered in slick mud. The rope is tied to a stake sunk deep in the soft ground, and the end outside the shelter of the hollowway is black and wet, shining in the twilight. Her heart forces itself up into her throat.

“Basira?” she calls out into the still evening. “Did you all go in for dinner or something? It’s a pretty rotten trick to play.” She walks toward the distant house through tall wet grass but stops when the rope pulls tight. She isn’t willing to untie herself yet, because something is _wrong_. And somehow she feels that she can still follow the rope out of here, even though the end is staked into the pasture. “Can anyone HEAR me?” she yells at the house. Her only answer is the distant bleating of a sheep. “HELLO?”

The pasture is silent, so still it’s as if time isn’t passing at all. Tears well hot in Melanie’s eyes, and very quietly she says to herself, “That’s… that’s fine, then. You can deal with this. This isn’t the hardest thing you’ve had to deal with. Just need to get your phone and pray that in the year 2117 it still gets service.

The back door bangs open and and her head whips up to see Daisy stumble out, looking disheveled. “Miss King?” she calls. “I’m sorry, I just woke up.”

Melanie’s mental compass flips on its axis with a gut-swooping suddenness as the fading light in the western sky becomes the predawn light of the coming sun. The wetness on the grass is dew, not rain, and she has missed the entire night. She nearly sinks to the ground right there. “I…”

“Let’s get you untied and I can start on some breakfast.”

Melanie doesn’t resist as Daisy’s iron fingers unpick the knot; she lets herself be led inside and sat down at the kitchen table.

“You were in there for a week,” Daisy says over her should from the stove. “Your friends don’t expect to see you again this century, though they did wait nearly two days for you.”

“Oh,” says Melanie.

“I can drive you into Newport to catch the train. You’ll get into London in about two hours, and people should be waking up by then.” Melanie checks her phone. It’s 4:53 AM. “I think the first train’s at six, so we’re in no rush.”

When Melanie says nothing, Daisy turns to peer at her. “Are you all right? It wasn’t too terribly bad, was it?”

“It wasn’t that bad at all,” says Melanie quietly. “I heard some things I…” She sighs.

“Jack’s not coming back, is he?”

“No.”

“He was never entirely here in the first place. I thought he might have learned… Oh, well. I’m glad one of you made it back.” Her solid hand slaps onto Melanie’s shoulder, and she begins to think _she_ might feel solid again some day.

 

Tim’s the first one in that morning. When he opens the warehouse door and finds Melanie sitting at the table with her laptop closed in front of her, he stops dead. “What are you,” he says slowly.

She raises her head to glare tiredly at him. “I’m Melanie, believe it or don’t.”

He leaves the door open behind him and stands there watching her. He’s tense, like he’s ready to run if she tries anything. “Were they lying, then, about the hundred years thing? That guy Jack an actor?”

“I didn’t go all the way in,” she mutters. “Had a rope. Which I _thought_ Basira was holding. Jack’s gone. Walked into a fairy funeral or something. I don’t know.” She watches irritably as Tim paces around the table like she’s a fucking bomb, but she doesn’t try to avoid him as he puts a testing hand on her shoulder.

“People don’t _come_ back,” he says.

She shrugs. “You can watch my footage.”

And then suddenly she’s being scooped up out of her chair and squashed into his chest, feet dangling above the floor. “Oh, what the hell, Tim! Let go!”

“You’re Melanie,” he says, grinning. “You’re not dead or cursed or whatever! You came back!”

“What are you so happy about?” She tries to wriggle out of his warm, solid grasp, but for the first time since she descended into the hollowway she feels real again. So… she doesn’t try _too_ hard.

He lets out a sort of disbelieving snort, and finally sets her down onto her feet. “I dunno how to tell you this, boss, but caring about your friends is kind of the standard.”

She stares up at him, feeling slow. Huh. Someone ‘cares’ about her. Whatever that means.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See if you can't get your hands on a copy of Robert McFarlane's _Holloway_. Dreamy, poetic, really not very long. I fell in love instantly.


	15. Come Buy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Depersonalization, literalized.

Jon sits too close to Melanie’s side all that day; Sasha and Martin try to act like all of this is very normal; Michael fusses over her and makes far too much tea; Basira’s furious. After spending about ten minutes yelling at Melanie in a voice barely above normal speaking volume, she wraps herself in a vicious silence and talks to no-one at all. But nobody else doubts that Melanie is herself. They all watch her footage, gathered around her laptop (except Basira, who’s Gone Out), and then stare at the black screen with the replay arrow for a moment.

“We going to air it?” asks Tim finally.

“What do you all think?”

“We’d have to stage a redo of your homecoming,” says Sasha. “We have a little footage of us waiting for you, but it’s not a very satisfying thing to end the episode on.”

“No,” Jon snaps. “That’s—that’s tacky. I’m not going to perform the five stages of grief for a television show. Just put Melanie’s footage at the end and I’ll do some bridging narration.”

So it’s settled. Melanie hunches in the chair next to Tim and moodily watches him editing until Sasha tells her they’re going out to lunch and they’re going to have a lovely time and not brood at all. Melanie broods _some_ over her fettucine, but it’s a bit difficult while Sasha is showing her pictures of her baby niece and talking about having a spring party for the crew and some friends.

So Melanie helps with the guest list and they brainstorm venues (because it would be a little crowded if they had it in the offices) and it’s not until Monday that anything comes up.

Everyone’s been researching full-pelt, looking for potentially haunted places, and they have a good few to investigate, but their next project comes from Martin’s shopping trip. As he explains, he goes to the New Covent Garden Market occasionally, and he’s never seen anything like this before. It doesn’t seem like the way these place spirits normally operate—shouldn’t they consistently either be there or not be there?

“Is it possible that the spirit _just_ got strong enough to be visible?” asks Sasha.

“No, the market’s existed since around 1200 CE, and the current location’s been in use since 1974, that’s plenty of time. I think something _weird’s_ going on.”

“Weird _is_ our specialty,” says Basira. “Go over it in detail, again, so we know what we need to bring.”

Five minutes later Tim slides his scrap paper into the center of the table, and everyone breaks off discussing whether rope is going to be necessary to lean in and look at it. It’s quite a good likeness of Basira and Martin, with large backpacks and crowbars and large coils of rope slung over their shoulders, attracting stares from the other people in the wholesale market.

When everyone’s finished laughing and  Basira has sheepishly agreed to limit herself to only the most obviously relevant supplies, Michael snatches the drawing and magnets it to the fridge like a proud mother. There it joins architectural drawings, publicity photos, and a few articles about strange phenomena clipped from the newspaper. Melanie’s quite fond of the fridge.

 

Because of the £5 entrance fee, and to blend in, Melanie, Basira, and Sasha decide they might as well do some shopping while they’re at the market. Tim seems to believe that nothing _that_ bad can possibly happen in a public place like a market, so he’s come along to get a lot of nice shots of the crowds milling about and making their purchases. He’s much more scrupulous than Sasha ever has been about asking the wholesalers consent to be recorded as he films Basira buying onions or Melanie getting a bouquet for Beatrice.

After making their purchases they stow themselves in a corner and start ripping into a loaf of bread because the snacks are incredibly expensive and everyone’s hungry. “Still no sign of Martin’s ghosts,” says Sasha. “You think he tricked us into having a nice day at the market?”

“That scoundrel,” says Tim.

“It might be because he came alone,” Basira points out. “It didn’t really sound like the kind of thing you’d get if you were with friends. Maybe you’ve got to feel, you know, lost. Past helping.”

“So we’re not sending _you_ to look for ghosts, then,” says Melanie. Basira takes this as the compliment it is and smirks at her. “Sasha?”

“Of course. I’d never do that to Tim.”

Tim scowls at her and leans back against the wall, glancing at the camera on its tripod. “Jesus, I come on one job because I think maybe there’s safety in numbers, and now we’re sending Sasha to get menaced by ghosts _alone_. That seem a little backward to anyone?”

“We’re journalists, Tim! And I’m fine with it. Really.”

Tim throws his hands up in the air and takes a vicious bite of bread. And Sasha stands, dusts off her trousers, and starts reattaching the stabilizer to the camera.

Afterward, when they watch the footage, it will look like this:

The camera points toward Melanie, Basira, and Tim one last time, and Sasha puts her hand in front of it to wave where the audience can see her. “See you soon!” she says. Then the camera turns around and starts moving through the crowds.

“Got to think _lost_ ,” Sasha narrates. “I _do_ feel a little awkward here. And it’s kind of weird to think that this has been here for forty years. In some ways, _wow_! Forty whole years! But that’s just a blip considering the old Covent Garden market was started eight hundred years ago. We were trying to find the site of the market near the old convent earlier, but, you know, a lot changes in eight hundred years. It’s totally covered over now.”

She stops walking suddenly with a jerk. “Hang on… who… I don’t know if you’re seeing this, but the people in this part of the market look… weird.” Now that she’s stopped moving, it’s more obvious: of course the other shoppers’ faces were blurred with the camera going past so quickly. Now, when Sasha’s standing still, they’re still blurred, as if everyone is a two-second time lapse of themselves.  And their clothing doesn’t look quite right.

“Excuse me,” says Sasha. Her hand appears, waving in front of one of the shoppers. “Sorry, could you stop a minute?” They turn their blurred face toward her and pause, and it becomes clear that multiple versions of their face seem to be overlaid, all fearful. “Um, are you a spirit?” she asks, but they’ve already turned back to their path and walked past her.

“I’m not sure _when_ these people are from,” Sasha says, sounding worried. “I don’t know that it makes sense for them to be from before 1974, but they look it. It’s as if the market itself has a spirit that’s got nothing to do with the building.” She turns a full circle, and all around her are the strange blurred people whose clothing has the muted look of servants from 1850 going on errands. “That makes complete sense, of course. I’m just… er… not sure how I can get them to go back to being normal people now…”

She clears her throat. “Um, Covent Garden Market spirit? Sorry for bothering you. I can leave now if you want.”

She waits, silently. The regular noises of the market have become strangely muted and echoing. “Any minute now,” she whispers. “I’m sure the crew will come looking for me. And anyway, this isn’t dangerous. Just a bit creepy. …You know what, I’ll text them.” She holds her phone up in front of the camera and composes a text message to Tim: _Where are you? I can only see blurry people. Come find me!! I’m by the flower stall with all the marigolds._ And then she settles in to wait again. Her carefully calm breathing forms the rhythm of waiting as she stands in the middle of the walkway, a rock for the other shoppers to flow around.

After ten minutes watching the crowds go by she says, “I feel a bit strange. I mean, obviously I do. I feel like… this is so silly, but I feel like my face is…” She waits for another two minutes, breathing very steadily, before she lifts the camera and steps in front of it. “Nothing wrong with my face, right?” she says. Her voice sounds muted and echoing. Her face is… a little difficult to make out. She could certainly still be Sasha, but she might be someone else, too. “I don’t know if I can picture what it’s supposed to look like, but lots of people don’t know what their own face looks like. You know, unless they spend a lot of time looking in mirrors.” She lets out a very, very careful breath that nonetheless still shakes a little. “They’ll be here any minute, I’m sure. I’d leave the market, but, you know, it’s important to stay where you are when waiting for rescue.”

After a further eight minutes mulling that over she says, “Only, _who’s_ coming to get me?”

She doesn’t attempt to answer that question, at least not out loud. The blurred shoppers become rolling waves in front of the camera, and her breathing becomes less controlled, more like the relaxed sound of someone slipping into sleep.

Twenty-eight minutes into her footage, she screams and the camera jolts wildly as she spins around. When it settles Tim is looking down at it, looking almost ill with concern. “Sasha, what—your _face_. I thought I was imagining things.”

“Sasha?” she echoes, high and scared.

“That’s it, we’re getting out of here.” Tim takes the camera from her, and when the picture settles it’s clear that all the shoppers are in modern clothes, and that they all have faces. Then the film cuts out.

 

Compare to Tim’s footage on the handheld:

Sasha waves, and then turns to walk away. “We’re going to follow her, right?” Basira murmurs.

“Absolutely,” says Melanie.

“I’ll go,” Tim says. “I’ll be able to see over people’s heads.”

“Go on,” Melanie tells him, making a shooing motion with her hands. “One day we’ll exact our vengeance for your tallness.”

Tim manages a humorless laugh and goes off after Sasha. He follows her until she stops in the middle of the walkway next to a flower stall filled with marigolds. She’s looking around with her back to him for maybe ten seconds, and then she turns, revealing her strangely blurred face.

“What the hell?” Tim yelps. “Sash!”

She only turns away.

He pushes through the shoppers and puts a hand on her shoulder, prompting her to shriek and spin around. “Sasha, what—your _face_. I thought I was imagining things.”

“Sasha?” she says.

“That’s it,” Tim says, before the video cuts out.

 

Basira and Tim both spend the rest of the day sulking after a brief whispered shouting match: you should have gotten to her quicker! How could I have possibly known it was happening before she turned around? I don’t know, because we _study ghosts_ for a living? Look, I don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish here, do you think I don’t already feel like absolute shit about it?

Sasha’s care is left to Melanie, Jon, and Martin. It takes a couple hours of showing her photos of herself and her family for her face to go back to normal, and she’s vague for the rest of the day. She doesn’t clearly remember what happened, and she’s certainly not as upset about it as Tim and Basira are. She seems as confused as Melanie felt sitting in Daisy Tonner’s kitchen two hours before dawn and five days after everyone she knew thought she was dead.

Melanie recruits Martin and Michael to play Billionaire Banshee with Sasha (Jon, who is far too serious to _play_ any sort of game, acts as referee) until she feels a little more like a person. When Sasha starts to be able to do her favorite stupid witch voice, Melanie can finally relax.

Now she knows how the rest of them felt when she disappeared for a week. Sort of. She doesn’t like it much.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title is from [Goblin Market.](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44996/goblin-market)


	16. Bolt-Hole

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lost, squeezed, trapped underground

“When has exploring underground tunnels _ever_ led to anything good?” Tim demands.

“Well, it’s always interesting,” says Basira.

“Literally for the last eight days you’ve been pissed off at me for somehow putting Sasha in danger by—I honestly can’t keep fucking track of what you think I should’ve done. So _how_ is this different.”

“It’s different because I’m going alone.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s right, you’re the only one of us who’s immune to supernatural bullshit! How could I forget that!”

“If I’m only responsible for myself, I certainly can’t get mad at you.”

“I _think_ ,” cuts in Melanie, “that if there’s one lesson we learned, it’s that we should always go by the buddy system.”

“Or that we’re more likely to get genuine supernatural encounters on film when we don’t use the buddy system,” says Jon. Melanie smothers his face with her hand and he ducks away.

“Anyway, I’ll be going with you,” says Melanie as Jon takes off his glasses, squints reproachfully at her, and starts cleaning them on his shirt.

“I think one near-death experience is enough for the month,” says Basira, “don’t you?” Melanie wouldn’t have _died_ , but that’s not the point and arguing isn’t going to help her case. “Michael can come with me.”

“I’ve told you, I can’t leave,” Michael calls from the other room.

“You’re not busy!” she yells back. “I can hear the Animal Crossing music from here!” She huffs through her nose and surveys her other possible options. “Jon, then.”

“Funny enough, the other two times I’ve almost died in the underground haven’t disposed me kindly toward it,” he says. She gives him a look, and he returns it with a complicated look of his own. The two of them seem to be quite good at telepathic communication, which Melanie _mostly_ means as a joke. But not entirely. He sighs and puts his glasses back on. “Fine. This time we’re bringing a compass.”

“Bold of you to assume spirits won’t mess with magnetic fields to get you completely lost,” mumbles Tim from where he’s slouched back behind his laptop.

“It’s better than nothing,” Jon snaps.

 

The opening shot is of Jon peering down a cement-walled tunnel with his torch, narrating. “We’ve cut out the footage of where we actually found the entrance, because we can’t have anyone trying to get in. Obviously, we don’t know what’s down here yet, but rest assured that it’s something terrible and we don’t want any of our viewers to be exposed to it.”

“Leave exploring spooky tunnels to the professionals,” says Basira from behind the camera. “Anyway, you ready to go? We’ve got extra torches, extra _batteries_ , three compasses and a GPS just in case, two gallons of water—”

“Yes, you’ve made your point, let’s go.”

They set off into the tunnel. There’s something a little eerie about the lack of graffiti on the walls; it looks as if nobody has been here at all since it was built. No moss or mold, no dead bugs, and no sign of human habitation. It’s not long until they reach an intersection, and after a brief consultation they decide to turn right. Jon can be seen pencilling in the intersection on his nascent map.

At the next intersection the style of the walls changes completely. It’s now ancient crumbling brickwork, even underfoot when Basira points the camera downward. “Huh,” she says. “Why would the tunnels be built so… piecemeal?”

“Oh, don’t pretend you don’t have an idea,” says Jon. “We’re inside it now.”

“We should make sure we can still get out, then. We’ve barely been walking for five minutes so it shouldn’t be hard.”

Jon sighs a put-upon sigh, but follows Basira back to the first intersection. There are four paths now: the one they came from, one that goes straight ahead, and two that lead back in the direction of the entrance.

The camera turns to look at Jon, whose face is set and grim. “Which way?” he asks, and starts folding up his map until he can put it into his pocket.

“Flip a coin?” Basira suggests. “Heads, the closer one, tails, the further one.” She digs in her pocket and produces a 50p coin; flips it and declares, “Tails.”

“The closer one, then,” says Jon, and starts forward.

Basira hurries after him with a snort. “Are you trying to reverse-psychology the tunnels?”

“That depends on whether it’s working,” he mutters.

It’s not. When they reach another intersection, it’s obvious that this isn’t the way they came in; they backtrack and find only two possible paths now, and so they give up and decide to just go wherever the tunnels want to take them. Jon stares determinedly at his compass, although even from several feet away it’s obvious that the needle is just slowly rotating in a full circle.

In the next hour they pass through more brick, cement, chiselled stone, what appears to be a mineshaft, and a natural cave complete with stalactites and flowing water. They follow the stream for some time until it disappears into a small hole in the base of an elegant stone wall that almost looks like it belongs on a bank building.

It’s when they get away from the sound of trickling water that the humming becomes audible. The camera stops and looks toward Jon again, who’s standing still and tense and wide-eyed looking down the tunnel. “It sounds like a human voice,” he whispers.

“Yeah. But it’s probably not. Check it out, or run the other way?”

“For all we know this is where the tunnels want us to be, and we couldn’t run even if we want to. We should get closer. The more we know about the spirit, the less frightening it is.”

Basira laughs softly, and they start forward again. Jon goes in front to peer around a corner; looks back and shakes his head. He goes forward to peer around the next corner; looks back with wide eyes just as a voice says, in the same rocking cadence as the humming, “Fire and light for sacred things…”

Basira can be heard taking a deep breath, and then the camera moves forward and she joins Jon at the corner of the passage. There’s an old man walking down the passage, reciting… _something_.

“…for reading the Conjurations by, and for the incense, in all operations Lights are necessary…”

“Shall we say hello?” whispers Basira.

But he seems to hear her, because he turns and looks at them. “Phantasms, or… people?”

“Whichever’s more likely to get us out of here,” says Basira.

“You won’t get out of here,” says the old man in a heavy, glum voice. “But I suppose a bit of optimism can be forgiven, this early. You haven’t been here for long, have you?”

“Just over an hour,” says Jon. “Are you the spirit of the tunnels?”

“I don’t know… You could certainly call me that. They sustain me without any food, but that’s more a cruelty than anything. I can scarcely remember what it’s like up there in the sunlight… I could have fled _anywhere_ else, you know, but I was a fool. I thought myself clever. They’ll never find me here, I thought. And… I _was_ right.” He sighs. Jon glances at Basira.

“So you’re… human,” she hazards.

“What does it mean to be human, after all?”

“Most likely,” says Jon. “What have you tried in the way of escaping?”

“I’ve tried escaping,” says the old man uncertainly.

“I mean, systematically… you know what? Never mind. Just come on.”

Here the footage cuts rapidly: in every shot the torch illuminates a different type of corridor, and in every shot the old man is murmuring, “thou shalt take a square Lantern, with panes of Crystal glass…” or “with the Knife of the Art, and with the pen and ink…” or “silk of any colour except black or grey, whereon…” or just humming his tuneless tune. It seems to set Basira’s teeth on edge because more than once she snaps at him to quit singing. But he never stops for long.

Some hours in, the tunnels begin to narrow. At first it happens gradually, but then in one cut Jon stops in his tracks and says, “We’re turning around.”

“Shouldn’t we make sure this doesn’t go toward the exit? If you think about it, it’s _more_ likely to lead out because it’s the more difficul—”

“I’m not getting stuck again!” Jon says over her. He’s breathing heavily in the thick silence. “We’re turning around.”

The camera turns to face the old man instead, with a short scrape on the wall of the tunnel, and Basira’s hand appears to gesture for him to go back. The passage is much too narrow for her to pass him. He stops humming and for a moment he just stares at her in what seems like fear. Then he turns around and starts to walk.

It only takes about a minute before he has to slide in sideways, and then he’s stuck. “Go back without me,” he says, muffled because he can’t turn his head to face them. “I’ll be all right. It just wants to torture me a bit.”

“We’re getting you out of here,” says Basira.

“No, no, you’re not. You should worry about yourselves. It isn’t going to protect _you_. I’ve never seen anyone else twice.”

“All right,” says Jon, and he can be heard scraping backward out of the tunnel behind the camera. “Good luck.”

“Jon!”

“We can’t go _forward_.”

Basira takes the old man’s hand and says, “I’ll pull you out,” but he shakes his head and slips his hand out of her grip.

“No, no, just leave me here. Worry about yourselves,” he says again.

The camera backs away from him. “I hope you… aren’t stuck for too long,” says Basira. Then the passage bends and the old man is out of sight.

At the next corner it’s wide enough to turn around. And then, disorientatingly, two turns later there’s the ladder out, with light shining dimly down. Basira points the camera upward and says, “Yeah, it was _not_ protecting him.”

Jon makes a noise that could almost be a laugh, puts his torch in his pocket, and starts climbing.

 

“Sorry, so, you think this one guy is just trapped down there because the tunnel spirit hates him.”

“I mean, yeah?”

“Seems like it wanted you to meet him. Otherwise why get you lost in the first place?”

“Come see our old man museum,” mutters Tim. “We’ve only got one old man but you’ve _got_ to take a look at him.”

Sasha laughs, and then quickly apologizes.

“The weird thing is the exit came out in a totally different place than we came in. There must be entrances all over the city. We actually crossed under the river.”

Melanie points at the wall map, and Jon and Basira approach to squint at it, discuss something very quietly before sticking their pins in.

“All in all,” says Jon, “it wasn’t as bad as the other time I was almost crushed to death by a malevolent spirit underground.”

“Four stars,” Basira adds.


	17. The Archive

“We didn’t have any cameras with us. We weren’t looking for spirits. We were honestly just trying to do some research on bodysnatching and medical theatres in the early 19th century. It was me, Martin, and Tim—”

“I only came because the Fleming Library has kind of cool architecture. I want that on the record.”

“Noted!”

“You really don’t have to be taking notes. Once again, we’re recording this. You can transcribe it later. Anyway, Martin and I were at one of the study tables quietly reading with our stacks of old journals. But when I looked up Tim had wandered off. I shrugged and kept reading.”

“In her defense we had _no_ reason to think any of the Imperial College libraries were haunted.”

“No-one accused you of anything, Martin. So… yeah. I went off with my sketchbook to take down some of the nicer details. I dunno how long I was gone, but I ended up kind of down in the basement bit. I don’t think it was off-limits, because when I met the old woman she didn’t seem angry with me. I said hi, we got to chatting, and I asked her if there was any really cool architecture in the library that I’d missed. She offered to take me on a tour, said she could let me into the bit where they used to do operas. That was cool as hell, so of course I said yes.

“The theater bit is really lovely, it does some great things with arches, and I liked the molding… We chatted some more while she was waiting for me to finish sketching. I guess it is kind of relevant what we talked about—she was telling me about how she’d been a librarian there for like fifty years, longer than anybody else, and sometimes she felt like it was more her home than her house was. She also talked about, hah, her anarchist past in the sixties and seventies. And eighties. And nineties. And… well, I think she’s still an anarchist. Apparently she was too good a librarian for the university to fire when they found out about her politics. At least that’s what she told me, I dunno… And then she showed me down to the special collections in the basement, which she’s been basically in charge of, alone, since 1972 or something.

“It’s the kind of place where you have to wear gloves to touch anything and a dust mask to make sure you don’t sneeze and destroy a priceless book. And the architecture wasn’t anything fancy like the upper levels, but I still find it kind of fascinating to see what people almost eighty years ago thought utilitarian, non-public spaces should look like. There’s not a lot of those you can just get access to, you know? I actually got to go backstage at this really old theatre once an—fine. Fine, you don’t care about cool old theatres. But the special collections rooms were pretty interesting. It’s just, it was a maze down there. Dozens and dozens of these identical little square rooms, laid out in a grid but each room only had two doors and it wasn’t always the same ones. It was disorientating in kind of the same way as your footage of the Barbican art center, actually, where you never knew which direction you were going or how to get to the exit. Christine knew exactly where she was going, though. She looked like she could have navigated the place in her sleep.

“Every room we’d stop and she’d tell me what was stored there. I don’t remember the first one, but one of them was, like, 17th century accounts of folk medicine or something? That was the first one I… I kind of saw… well, at the time I didn’t know what it was. And heard, and smelled. In the other rooms before that I’d been getting these vague impressions that I thought was just me going a little weird in the head from the thick dust and the thicker silence. But in the folk medicine one she was standing there next to me, but she was also kneeling on the floor over someone, pouring what looked like milk on their face. I couldn’t see anything but the two of them, but I could tell it was a sunny day wherever they were, and people were screaming. I _swear_ as she crossed the room to go to the doorway someone shoved into me. And there was this weird chemical smell…

“I mean, I considered the idea that I was hallucinating, but I’m just not that lucky. I knew it had to be a spirit, I just didn’t understand how what looked like the spirit of a political protest was haunting St. Mary’s Fleming Library. And that was the most unsettling part, you know? The fact that even it being a spirit didn’t really explain it. Most spirits make sense, like you’ll see a fear of heights spirit at the top of a really tall building or a kid spirit in a field full of creepy dolls. Okay, I mean, _some_ spirits make sense, but almost all of them make more sense than a riot in the basement of a library. There was nothing about that place that was anything but quiet and dry and old. These _things_ just weren’t like any of the rest of it.

“But what the hell was I supposed to do about it? I didn’t know how to get out and I didn’t know how to explain what was going on. So… I kept following Christine. The next room was straight up a forest. I could barely hear her telling me what the books were—I think it was old catalogues of medicinal plants. I had to physically fight through the underbrush to follow her. And _all_ the rooms were like that, to one degree or another. Some of them I’d just hear the echoes of singing or shouting. One of them was filled with fucking seawater and it took me ages to get dry. At this point I’m like, okay, is she somehow trapping a ton of different spirits in here? Is this some kind of a ghost archive?

“I stopped her in one of the quieter ones—just a younger version of her and a woman who was maybe her sister, sitting in the corner together knitting—and I asked her if she could see any of this, any of the crazy stuff happening in these rooms. She just looked at me in total confusion, so I pointed to the corner and asked if she really couldn’t see herself and her sister there. And she looked… totally shocked. Asked me how I could possibly know that she thinks about her sister when she needs to find the room for—for—I dunno, I think it was monastic medical records or something? I tell her, look, your sister’s right there, I can see her, I don’t know what to tell you.

“So she goes into the next room and waves me to follow and she asks me what I can see in this scared voice. So I tell her, it’s some kind of a march protest thing. She asks me what about, and I tell her, and she’s clearly terrified that I’m reading her mind or something. She leads me straight out of the basement and up to her office and makes a cup of tea, and her hands are shaking. She’s quiet for a while, then she explains how she learned to navigate the special collections. All the rooms look the same, so she started coming up with mnemonics to help her remember which one leads into which one. And she’s been doing this for like forty years. So I tell her I figure her memories kind of soaked in and now the building remembers them too. This poor old woman’s just sitting here clattering her teacup in its saucer thinking about how she accidentally filled the special collections with ghosts, she clearly doesn’t know what to do about it. But she thanks me for letting her know and asks if I’m a psychic. Me. A psychic. I couldn’t keep from laughing, but she wouldn’t believe I’m just a film editor. Said I should be on TV reading minds.

“So… I guess that’s it. You can’t take a single step in this fucking city without tripping over a ghost. In line at the Mickey D’s? The guy in front of you’s a ghost. Trying to renew your driving license? Careful you don’t mistake that ghost for the photographer, that’d be embarrassing! Driving to work? Watch out for ghost traffic lights so you don’t cause a fucking—”

“You’re exaggerating,” Jon interrupts. “I’ve never seen a spirit in any building constructed after 1974.”

“Unless, you know, whatever was there _before_ is still haunting it. Or whatever’s next to it is haunting it.”

Sasha touches his arm. “If we’re going to be seeing ghosts anyway, it’s good to know as much about them as possible, right?”

He sighs. “Yeah. Guess so. Sorry for shouting, everyone. Sometimes I just get a little overexcited about how we’re all psychic because we spent too much time looking at ghosts. Don’t mind me. I’m just going to never go to a public place ever again. Maybe have a lie-down.”

He gets up and shuffles away to lie down on the couch, draping his jacket over his face.


	18. Morden Gothic

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Very bad mother. Some blood.

“Can you tell us about the bookstore on Abbotsbury Road?”

“The boy killed his mother for her money, didn’t he? But he didn’t read her will first. Found out she hadn’t left him a penny and he knew he’d be caught and rot in jail, and he turned his wicked knife on himself. He was still in mourner’s clothes when he died. They say you can hear him screaming sometimes.”

“Do you know what happened to her husband?”

“Was there a war on, then? I think he might have gone off to war. I can’t remember how long ago it was. It could have been in the fifties. But I never saw him.”

 

The carpet on the stairs is threadbare and the whole shop has an air of abandonment, like the family went on vacation and just forgot to come back. It’s a weird mix of shop and house, with leaning towers of books filling the offices and corridors and even the windowless kitchen, where decades-old dishes sit crusted on the counter. Whatever happened here, it happened suddenly.

 At least that’s what Melanie thinks until she hears a faint rhythmic sound. She holds up her hand in front of Jon’s chest and he stops, looking at her. “You hear that?” she whispers. The four of them stand still, listening. The noise is now clearly music, both tinny and muffled but identifiable as metal.

Melanie follows the music to a door and opens it just a crack. Someone is sitting with their back to the door, wearing headphones with the volume turned all the way up and leant over a desk. A black leather coat is hung over the back of the chair.

She withdraws from the door and hisses, “Someone lives here.”

“Are you sure they’re _alive_ , in the technical sense?” asks Jon.

“I dunno, I’ve never seen a spirit wearing headphones and using a writing desk but there’s a first time for everything!”

Sasha pushes past Melanie, hands her the camera, and then gives it a thumbs up. Then she walks into the room and taps whoever’s at the desk on the shoulder.

They jump up, pushing their chair over with a loud bang, and skitter across the room into the wall. Looks like a man, long-haired and stubbly with heavy black eye makeup and several piercings; probably forty or fifty years old. He slides his headphones down around his neck and stands pressed into the wall. His eyes flick to the open door and the camera Melanie’s holding. “What the hell,” he says.

“Everyone we talked to said this place was abandoned,” says Sasha apologetically. “We were going to ask if it was okay to use what we filmed here.”

“Well it’s not bloody abandoned,” says the man. He does not relax. “I live here. What’s the point filming in an _abandoned_ shop, anyway?”

“There’s supposed to be a ghost,” says Sasha brightly.

The man visibly clenches his jaw and swallows, looking suddenly ill. “Yeah? Are you ghostbusters? You gonna get rid of her?”

Sasha stops. Cocks her head. “Her? As far as I could tell, the ghost was you.”

He stares.

“So… who is it?”

“Can you get out of my room?”

“Oh! I’m so sorry.”

Everyone backs out of the doorway, then out of the hall as Sasha and the man emerge. He turns off his music and a sudden choking silence falls as he stares at them standing in his kitchen, which still looks as abandoned as if hasn’t used it in decades. Silence feels like the natural state of this house, now undisturbed again as if it never had been.

The man stands in the threshold, not disturbing it.

Melanie holds out her hand and begins, “I’m Melanie—” but he shushes her furiously. She stops, taken aback.

“Gerard? Do we have customers?” calls a voice from somewhere further down the hall.

“No, Mum. It’s just my music.”

“Turn it off.”

“Yes, Mum.”

He turns back to Melanie and her crew, and puts a silent finger to his lips. He passes them noiselessly, and when they don’t follow he gestures them to come with him. Melanie finds herself tiptoeing as well, infected by the fear of his unseen mother.

 

“Can you tell us about the bookstore on Abbotsbury Road, CJ?”

“I mean, it’s like I said on the phone…”

“For the camera, though?”

“Oh, yeah, sure. So, the ghost is this teen boy who walks out the door every night at sunset and then disappears. I heard his mum locked him in the basement and when she stopped bringing food he just stayed there and starved to death. And he goes out every night looking for her. They don’t know if it’s for revenge… or if he’s still hungry.”

“And what about his dad?”

“Oh, she _definitely_ killed him.”

 

Gerard closes the front door carefully behind them and then sags against it with a sigh. He starts fumbling in his pocket for a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, completely oblivious to the teenagers staring at him from across the street. “She died twenty fucking years ago and she still won’t fucking leave,” he mutters tonelessly. “If you can—put her to rest, or exorcise her, or _something_ —you can put whatever you want on TV.”

“What happened?” asks Martin.

Gerard turns his head and blows a stream of smoke in Martin’s direction. “It was a customer who found her. I dunno why she did it. Why anyone would choose to die that way. The courts couldn’t figure it out either, so they decided I’d done it. I wasn’t paying close enough attention to understand why they let me go—I was almost hoping they’d stick me in prison, you know? So at least I wouldn’t be in this house. But they didn’t, and I’ve got nowhere else to go. And she’s not dead enough.”

“I’m sorry,” says Martin. “Do you have any idea why she’s still here?”

“Dunno,” Gerard mumbles. “To yell at me.”

Jon clears his throat. “That’s the wrong question. Because ghosts aren’t real.”

“Out of line,” snaps Melanie.

“I don’t doubt that his mother is _here_ ,” says Jon. “But whatever she is, she isn’t a ghost. Don’t you think if ghosts existed we would have seen one?”

“It’s kind of an academic distinction,” says Melanie testily. “If impressions of dead people from the 1800s turn up and erase your face does it _really_ matter whether they’re ghosts or not?”

“In this case it does. Spirits don’t exist by their own volition. They exist because of ours.”

“Except that bomb one. And the tree.”

“Not _now_ , Martin!” Jon turns toward Gerard. “Either the building remembers her, or you do. Which is it?”

Gerard leans his head wearily backward, closes his eyes, and takes the world’s tiredest drag on his cigarette. “How the hell do I know? I’m not a ghost hunter. You’re the professionals.”

“What, er, what Jon means to say,” Martin cuts in, “is, do you think your mother had a special connection to the building? Was she—part of it, or, sorry, not exactly part of it, but…”

“Nah. Buildings are just things to her. Like people.”

“Then it’s probably her connection to you! Which is, I mean, it’s not easy, but it’s easi _er_ to get rid of. Or, actually, maybe it’s harder… Er, the thing about spirits is that they’re linked to our emotions—in a way they feed off them. I’m not blaming you. I, er, I know… how family can be. They don’t ask first. But she’s keeping herself alive through you.” Gerard opens his eyes just enough to give Martin a hopeless look. “I understand feeling trapped, believe me. I understand feeling like you have nowhere to go, feeling like no-one can help you. I understand feeling like she’s heavier than the whole world. It’s not _easy_ to get rid of ghosts like that, but it’s… well, I think it’s possible.”

“Yeah? How.”

“You’ve got to ask for help. You find people who will help you carry that weight. And honestly? You clean house. Get rid of the stuff that reminds you of her.”

“I can’t throw out her stuff. She’ll… you know.”

“She’s dead, Gerard.”

CJ and her friends hiding across the street seem to have finally gotten up the nerve to approach, and she comes to stand next to Melanie and Sasha. “So are you the ghost or what?”

“I’m not the ghost.” Gerard gives Martin a long look. “There is no ghost, just me. Sorry to disappoint.”

“But you come out _every_ night at sunset and just vanish!”

“Maybe I vanish because I don’t want you gawking at me. No-one ever told you it’s rude to stare?”

“Maybe if she could see the inside of the house she’d be convinced?” Martin offers. He’s doing something very complicated with his eyebrows that Gerard doesn’t seem to be able to interpret any better than Melanie can.

“Er… I mean, I guess.” Gerard opens the front door and holds it for CJ and her friends to go in.

From where she stands on the threshold Melanie can hear Gerard’s mother call out, “Are those customers, Gerard?”

He takes a breath to answer, but Martin puts a hand on his shoulder and shakes his head. Points up the stairs to the three teenagers peering into the office. It’s clear they didn’t hear the voice. “We’re very good at seeing and hearing spirits,” he says under his breath to Gerard, “but for a lot of people they just don’t exist at all.”

 

“Can you tell us about the bookstore on Abbotsbury Road?”

“It’s been abandoned ever since the boy was arrested. It was in all the papers that he killed his mother—they lived there, above the shop. But I dunno… when I was a kid we were all scared of her. Always coming in at odd hours. Some of the other kids said she was a witch. Who was it… Davie Linsell? Claimed she cursed him for throwing rocks at her. He moved up north, or I’d ask him. Anyway, I don’t know if I can say whether she deserved what he did to her… maybe he was a witch too, or something like that.”

“Do you know what happened to his father?”

“Hah. Same thing that’s always happening to people’s fathers.”

 

The crew helps carry books out front to the tables—old books, many of them, but Gerard doesn’t want to sell them for more than £5; the majority of them are on the 50p table. CJ has recruited a large number of runners to put up signs and flyers about the book sale, and now people are turning up from all over the neighborhood to see the man they thought was a ghost. And maybe buy some books, when Melanie glares at them for gawking.

Martin and Gerard come down the stairs carrying the pieces of another bookshelf, which are quickly snapped up as well for a much more substantial sum of money. Gradually the people get bored and clear out; most of the books are still there, so the crew helps bag them up, where they’ll be taken to a charity shop later.

“Just one room left,” says Gerard, looking away up the stairs. The dread is palpable in his expressionless voice, all the more unsettling now that Melanie has heard him smile and seen him roll his eyes.

“D’you want us to come with you?” asks Sasha.

“G-d, yeah.” He stumps up the stairs and leads them as far as the end of the hall, where he stands looking down it toward the one door at the other end that hasn’t been opened.

“I’ll go first,” says Melanie. He doesn’t tell her no, just stares at the door, so she walks down the long hall and opens it. It’s a bedroom and study, choked with even more books than the office, so that at first she doesn’t even see the body lying in the huge spreading bloodstain in the middle of the floor. When she does, she sucks in a breath and mutters, “Jesus.”

The body opens its eyes. Melanie startles and steps backward. She’s not sure what she expected Gerard’s mother to look like, but it honestly wasn’t ‘bald and covered head to toe in tattoos.’ She doesn’t look dead at all as she sits up and then gets to her feet. Maybe most troublingly, Melanie can’t figure out what killed her.

“Well, hello,” she says. “Have you gotten lost? I can be right out shortly.”

Melanie can’t think of anything to say before Gerard fills the doorway behind her and his mother’s eyes lock onto him. “Well!” she says in the same pleasant voice. “If it isn’t Gerard. Have you spent the last twenty years doing absolutely nothing useful, like you spent the first twenty? I don’t think we’ve had a single customer in all this time. You might as well have killed me yourself.”

Gerard is silent.

She walks forward. “Or are you going to try to tell me you’ve been working hard for your poor old mother?”

“Why’d you do it,” he whispers. Pale in the dim light of the study, he looks like the dead one, as if his mother’s ghost has taken his corporeality.

“To destroy you, of course! You were thinking of running away. I just prevented you from making a mistake. You never were a very good son, but I think you could still learn, if you just tried.”

“I think we should just smash her stuff,” says Melanie. Gerard jerks as if he’s been slapped. “Go ahead and be a bad son, your mum was a _bitch_.”

Gerard flees. In the hall Martin is standing, looking sick and red-eyed, with Sasha holding his arm. “We’ll try this again in a bit,” Melanie tells them. “Maybe we can get him to let us take her stuff later.”

Martin makes a small distressed noise and hurries down the corridor as well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Of course, this all takes place in the AU where Martin is capable of either empathy or compassion. I had to give him _something_ to do, or he would just be another researcher. Thank you for continuing to suspend your disbelief about my OOC writing of him.


	19. A New Chair

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Overstimulation.

“Honestly, almost every community I’ve ever moderated has been nicer on average.” Sasha tilts up her screen so Michael, leaning over her shoulder, can see better. “I mean, there’s plenty of nice people, but like half the commenters are just here to get up in arms about us faking our footage.”

“I suppose it’s safer for them that way,” says Michael. “People can be so narrowminded! It’s like they don’t know the size of a skull is infinite if you shrink your thoughts small enough!

“I don’t know what specifically that means, but I’m with you.”

“Well—”

“Gerry’s here,” Martin announces. “Or, he’s in the lobby of the IKEA. I’m going with him, does anyone else want to come?”

“Oh,” says Sasha, “I have a _lot_ of opinions about furniture.”

“Doesn’t that disqualify you?” asks Melanie, grinning over the top of her computer. “He’s furnishing a bachelor pad, not the House of Usher. Can you imagine trying to eat dinner off that bizarre table you showed me?”

“It’s a conversation piece,” says Sasha haughtily, as she stands and snaps shut her laptop.

“Hang on,” says Michael. “Are you thinking of going into the IKEA?”

“Yeah?”

“You shouldn’t. It’s an awesome place. Awful? Am I thinking awesome or awful? ‘Awe’ was definitely in it. Anyway, _I’d_ know.”

“I’d ask if you want to come, but I’m sure you’ve got very important video games to be playing,” says Sasha, without malice. “Tim, Basira, Jon, you staying?”

“Uh-huh,” says Tim, not taking his eyes off his computer. Basira and Jon don’t even seem to notice her speaking.

“Melanie?”

“Could use an excuse to stretch my legs.”

Michael tails the three of them out the door, wearing an expression that looks almost cross except for the fact that his face seems physically incapable of not smiling. The worst he can really manage is ‘charmingly vexed.’

Gerard is waiting in the lobby of the IKEA with his headphones blaring, looking uneasy. His shoulders sag slightly when he sees them coming, he lifts a hand in greeting, and says loudly, “I’m not taking these off, so if you want me to know something you can damn well text me. Let’s go.”

Michael mutters something that gets lost in the weird echoing chaos that is the IKEA lobby (why does it feel so much like an airport?), and they’re off to the showrooms to look for the cheapest, blandest, least haunted-looking dining room table available.

They wander through a pseudo-room stacked with miscellaneous lamps, at which Gerard mutters “Maybe later,” and into a sort of grid of large elaborately made-up beds. Sasha peers into the next room and says, “Oh, there are some tables in here!” Martin and Gerard hurry after her, and Melanie is left looking around for Michael, wondering how he’s already managed to get himself lost.

She texts him asking where he is and jumps as a loud buzzing comes from the floor behind her. She stoops to pick up Michael’s phone, feeling uneasy. You can’t exactly drop your phone accidentally right out of your trouser pocket, or fail to notice if it drops out of your hand. _Even_ if you’re Michael Shelley. “Michael?” she calls, looking around for him. “Are you playing some kind of stupid joke?”

Martin pokes his head around the doorway. “Did Michael run off somewhere?”

“I guess. He left his phone on the floor.”

“I mean… we’re going to be wandering around the whole store anyway, so we can look for him as we go.”

“Yeah…”

Losing track of Michael has killed any enthusiasm Melanie had for actually shopping here, and the displays upon displays of household items are so much meaningless noise in the way of finding him. There’s too much of absolutely everything in too many different varieties. In self-defense Melanie has to stop even considering them separate things and just blur them into strangely-shaped decoration.

Martin, Sasha, and Gerard seem intent on comparing two sets of chairs, arguing about how many chairs Gerard actually needs, while Melanie anxiously scans the exits for any sign of Michael. “Hang on, but what about this set? Like, how much are you going for an everything-black aesthetic?”

“It’s all the same to me, I can just paint them black if I…”

“…furniture before? It’s kind of a…”

“…can move on, then? All right. Check. Do you feel like you need to change out your bath towels, or have those not…”

Melanie drifts after them as they make their way through a gaggle of model kitchens. She’s not a fan of the little half-rooms standing on their own. Their low, skeletal ceilings that conceal nothing of the vast unnecessary void above them, the distant ductwork. Standing in these fake kitchens she feels uneasy but isn’t sure why. “Michael,” she says again. She’s pretty sure he won’t even be able to hear her over the weird twee pop music coming out of the distant ceiling. She’s _seen_ aerial shots of IKEAs, and while they’re not infinite in size they might as well be. She’s standing somewhere near the center of an impossibly long, impossibly wide labyrinth marked with helpful arrows that take you nowhere.

Gerard has stopped looking at furniture, sprawling listlessly in a chair he’s taken down from the wall. The screaming coming out of his headphones clashes badly with Owl City. “I’m tired,” he says loudly over it. “Isn’t this enough? I just want to go home. _If_ we can get out of here.”

“You just have to follow the arrows,” Martin explains to him; he points at his headphones and raises his eyebrows, and Martin flushes and pulls out his phone.

Melanie looks down at the floor. The arrows aren’t even labelled. She takes back calling them ‘helpful,’ even sarcastically.

“We can do all the deciding online,” Sasha is saying, out loud despite the uselessness of it. “Gerry can just tell us what to pick up and then he won’t have to come in here. It _is_ pretty overwhelming. Come on.”

The party sets out, following the arrows on the floor. Everyone except Melanie seems to have forgotten all about looking for Michael. She imagines him saying, “Don’t stray from the path! That’s how you’ll be trapped in Fairyland!”

After ten minutes of walking they take a rest. Melanie looks into the room to the right, where Gerard forgot to put away the chair he was sitting on. “We’ve just gone in a huge—meander!” she bursts out. “Look, it took us ten minutes following the arrows but we could have walked straight through!” She turns and looks at the arrows leading out of this room, and then through the doorway on the opposite side, through all the giant cages full of pillows. “We can take a shortcut,” she says, and points.

“Anything to get out of here quicker,” says Martin. “It’s starting to… I don’t know, I just feel _weird_.”

Sasha looks around uneasily. “Yeah.”

But when they step into the next room, the arrows are pointing back where they came from. It only takes ten minutes of fruitless arrowless wandering before Gerard snarls, “We follow the arrows. The shortcuts are taking _much_ longer.”

So they follow the arrows as the path meanders around other tired and confused shoppers, and then no shoppers at all, and still no Michael. At one point Melanie wonders if they’ve somehow wandered into a backroom of some kind, because rather than display furniture in the model rooms there are just white cardboard boxes arranged as if they’re furniture. The path the arrows take begins to straighten out, which Sasha says is a good sign until they start to curve back in the direction they’re pretty sure they came from.

The arrows are leading them in an enormous spiral, and they’re all too tired  to care what they’ll find at the center. If they’re  very, very lucky it will be the checkout counters. If they’re not…

They walk. Gerard’s jaw is permanently clenched; Martin is wringing his hands; Melanie feels like her head’s been stuffed full of cotton wool. Around and around and around, passing by rooms she’s no longer sure whether they’ve visited before, because all of them pretty much look the same once you’ve seen enough of them. Now the spiral is only about four rooms wide. Now three. And at the center… what looks like a haphazard pile of furniture. Chairs lying on the floor surrounding a lamp, tangled in one of the wire containers for duvet covers or something.

“There aren’t any arrows leading out of this room,” Sasha reports. “What’s special about this place? I was expecting something… different from everywhere else.”

One of the chairs moves. Not in the way chairs are supposed to move—the slats on the back curl upward toward the seat, and it lifts, and it’s— they’re _fingers_. It’s a _hand_. The lamp stoops and the hanging shower caddies step over another chair on the floor and _how exactly_ did Melanie mistake a person for a pile of furniture?

“The arrows always lead to me,” it says, in Michael’s voice. Melanie feels dizzy. Is that what Michael looks like? Is that what he’s always looked like? His wide, watery blue eyes emerge from the weird twisting lampshade of his hair and he holds out a chair—a hand. “Can I have my phone back?”

Melanie gives him his phone.

“Oh, I got a text message. It’s from you, Melanie! ‘Where are you, how did you already get lost?’ Well, I’m right here, and I—oh, should I text you my reply?”

“Why did you—what—if the arrows lead to you, why didn’t you just wait at the exit!” Martin sputters.

“Oh, that’s not really how things work around here. You think I know how to get to the exit?” Michael laughs his unsettling laugh, but here in an infinite labyrinth of household goods it’s worse. It echoes strangely and somehow there’s a high-pitched buzzing that gets right into Melanie’s skull and makes her grit her teeth in pain.

Gerard stalks forward and grabs Michael by the front of his shirt. “Get. Us. Out of here.”

“I’ll do my best!” says Michael brightly. He slithers out of Gerard’s grasp and walks toward one of the other doorways, ploughing through the pile of furniture in the middle of the room. And what can they do but follow?

By any reasonable metric, Michael is as lost as they ever were. But he seems confident as he walks forward, and that soothes Melanie just enough to keep following him. Everyone else’s spirits seem similarly broken.

He leads them through room after room, winding nonsensically around the showroom labyrinth, until Melanie begins to wonder if this _is_ even Michael, or if it’s the spirit of this place trying to get them irretrievably lost, if it’s taken his face the way the spirit of the plague pits took Karolina Górka’s. The longer they walk the more likely this seems, until finally she gets in front of him and says, “You’re just leading us in circles. What are you really?”

He stops, blinks. “The spirit of the IKEA. I did tell you that, didn’t I? I honestly can’t remember now.”

“What happened to Michael.”

“I’m Michael. I don’t think I look _that_ different.” He steps around her to go through the doorway. “Now, I have a good feeling about this one.”

“You’re going to lead us nowhere until we die!” she shouts at him.

“I’m sure we’ll find an employee—oh, no here we are. Straight shot to the checkouts from here. I told you I’d find the way out! If only by accident!” He laughs again, and Melanie and Martin clutch their heads. “Anyway, I’ll see you back at the office. It’s a little much in here, isn’t it?” He strides through the rows of steel shelves of flatpack boxes and vanishes behind the cash registers.

“All right,” says Martin. “Let’s get out of here. I don’t even care about actually buying anything, let’s just _leave_.”

Gerard slides off his headphones and glares at him. “Like hell! I did not just endure three hours of wandering around in the fucking home goods labyrinth to not _buy_ anything. Help me find my boxes.”

They’re all jangled and snappish and frayed, but finally they manage to get everything paid for and loaded onto a dolly to take them back to the offices. Gerard accepts Martin’s offer of tea and a nice quiet couch to lie down on for a while before they try to scrape up a car to take the boxes to his new flat. He quickly falls into an exhausted sleep on the couch next to his untouched mug of tea. Tim is still editing. Basira and Jon have moved on to arguing over a floorplan of something or other. When Melanie peers anxiously into Michael’s office he’s sitting sideways in his chair playing Okamiden on his DS. She sags with relief.

“I’m glad you made it out of the IKEA,” she offers. “We had quite a hard time with it.”

He tips his head backward to look at her upside-down. “I know.”

“Yeah, that’s just how IKEA is. Er, so, I know you lost your phone, and I did pick it up, but I accidentally gave it to—”

Michael digs in his pocket and holds up his phone. “No, you gave it to me. Thanks, by the way! I don’t know how I ever would have found it!”

She stares at him.

“What?”

“Would you describe yourself as… the spirit of the IKEA?”

“Isn’t that how I introduced myself to everyone? I mean, that was almost a year ago, it’s hard to remember. Actually, was it two years? It was summerish, I know that. Well, I guess I don’t know anything, but, you know!” He laughs. “Or you don’t.”

“I’m pretty sure you introduced yourself as a clone…?”

“What? I’m not a clone! What a silly thing to say!”

Melanie gives up and goes back into the other room to have a nap at the table. Michael will still be there once her brain isn’t crammed full of wrong, wrong, wrong shapes and strange echoing laughter.


End file.
